Snickers
by Kyn
Summary: In which the protagonist adopts a hunter, and ends up realizing just how unhealthy, blistered, scratched up, and mold-covered the nasty things are. This one purrs, though, so that sort of makes up for it...
1. Chapter 1

She jogged, sweating in the autumn heat and cupping her hands around her face to make a primitive amplifier. "Snickers!" she hissed up at the buildings, but nothing answered her. Did she dare raise her voice louder? The town had _looked_ clear, as if everything had been drawn off a long time ago by the military bunker to the north. "God _damn_ it I miss GPS. What I wouldn't give for a tracking device on this stupid _cat_ ," she growled, slowing down as she came upon an old overturned tire filled with water. Hmm. She knelt and pulled out her ceramic water filter, and dipped the nozzle into the water. Pump, pump, pump. Fresh water, at least, would get her through this muggy autumn afternoon. She took a grateful sip.

A murder of crows was perched on the telephone wires around her, unperturbed by her presence, some with bits of infected flesh clasped between their beaks. She sneered at them. "If any of you dare to mutate a bird flu version of all this, I'm going to finally give up and blow my brains out," she confessed as she hooked her water back to her side and lifted up her rifle to peer through the scope.

Where was he? She scanned the horizon down the street, but there was no sign of him. "I'm going to kill him," she muttered. "Night's almost here and we're in the middle of a wasteland ghost town..." Time to risk shouting. "Snickers! _Snickers!"_ She started running again. "Where the hell are you!?" His absence was starting to scare her, and being scared tended to make her giddy: "Here, kitty-kitty-kitty-kitty! Heeeerrreee kitty-kitty-kitty-!"

Something like a cougar scream echoed up from a distant apartment building, and she skid to a halt. Alright, she recognized that sort of call: Nothing like a lion or tiger roar, not one of the spitters, or the tanks. So she'd got _some_ hunter's attention. She slunk back against cover, glancing around and mostly _up_ to better anticipate its arrival.

The rapid cracking and crumbling of brick and tile made her spin about to view the building behind her. She was jut barely fast enough to catch sight of the hunter slowing his fall before he'd repelled off the wall. She twisted back to see him touch down on the dumpster beside her. He shrieked directly in her face, teeth spread wider than would have been humanly possible.

She saw: Clean, dark black hoodie; Neatly bandaged hands; Half missing jaw, the flesh and bone torn into a gaping, toothy, perpetual smirk.

 _"Snickers_ , _"_ she sighed in relief, dropping the nose of her rifle and then wiping her face clean with her forearm. " _Thanks_. That was lovely fish breath."

He threw his head back, and what was left of his mouth tightened into a curling grin. He snorted, sniffled and chortled in his retentive way.

She shook her head, still more relieved then she necessarily wanted to say, and came up beside him to pat his shoulder. "Yeah yeah. Laugh it up. Here I was all worried about you, thinking you might have tripped over a witch somewhere, and you've just been strolling about, enjoying the heat..."

He conjured up a rumbling wheeze, a _purr_ , in the back of his throat, and arched his back into her.

"Worst cat ever. Worst dog ever. Worst- Whatever you are, you're doing it wrong- I'm sure of it."

He wouldn't have risked drawing attention to her if he'd smelled anything even remotely dangerous. Snickers might not have understood any _words_ she said, specifically, but the two of them had still been together plenty long enough to communicate regardless. And when he rolled over casually onto his back and flopped all four sets of claws into the air, it was a pretty good indicator this was one of the safest cities they'd ever been in.

"Hmph." She indulged him, playing with his rake-like toes for a moment and letting him kick and paw harmlessly at her palms. "Alright. Come on," she gave his side a hearty smack and then turned to head back towards the safe house she'd been fortifying for the night, "time to get inside."

He mumbled and rolled back over onto all fours, and climbed up onto the nearest window that he might follow along beside her at a useful vantage point. Hunters weren't particularly deadly on open ground, and as experienced as Snickers might have been in using teamwork to bring down enemy infected, he wasn't a free ticket to survival. The missing teeth had denied him the chance at many an important death blow, particularly against other hunters.

Snickers found a good ledge to trot across that was almost level with her head. She lifted a hand up casually to pet him as they walked. "Just because you didn't run into anything doesn't mean this city's abandoned. You better hope there are no other _people_ hiding out here," she reminded herself that more than she could ever successfully chastise him. "That ugly face of yours won't earn us too many friends, and people have got a bit of a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policy on undead nowadays."

He just trotted along, right as rain, an apex predator entirely secure in himself and his own abilities, and _positive_ that no nefarious interlopers would dare challenge him for territory. Looking at him all puffed up and smug made her want to scream 'Tank' at the top of her lungs just to scare the shit out of him. _That_ was one of the few words he'd _definitely_ memorized. And when wasn't it funny to startle a cat? One might even argue it was good for them. Alleviated boredom or somesuch. There was a Monty Python skit on this; there had to be.


	2. Chapter 2

Their safehouse for the night was a poorly barricaded apartment whose previous owner had long since succumbed to the flu and wandered away. Snickers quietly nosed through the cupboards, inspecting old tins of food for any signs of rupture or bloating.

Once upon a time, Snickers had insisted upon consuming an extensively compromised can of salted lamb meat, and she'd let him get his way because who in their right mind would have expected a _zombie_ to get ill? Then he'd spent a week in the foetal position, completely limp, largely paralyzed, wholly incontinent, and whimpering in pain.

Botulism, as it turned out, was just one of those rare few toxins that still seemed to work on infected, possibly because the toxin was fungal rather than viral or bacterial, or perhaps because it could spread through the body on its own by spores, or maybe just because it affected muscle nerves instead of the brain. Whatever the case, she and Snickers had learned their lesson: zombies shouldn't eat rotten things.

While he scavenged, she picked up an old television set and placed it quietly against the front doorway. Even the shittiest stumbling block was still five more seconds of badly needed reaction time. Well, that, and it made it more likely her bear traps would catch hold of something. As she worked, she could hear Snicker's claws tapping across the tile kitchen flooring like a dog's nails. The sound left her momentarily nostalgic.

Something excited him, and he quickly turned himself about and trotted out to find her. His gait had improved the longer he'd been with her, but he still walked on his finger pads as if they were ostridge toes and used his knees like a second set of feet. He came up to her and plopped his rump on the ground, and she turned about to see him very nearly oozing with glee with an old battered can of Starkist tuna clasped between his damaged jaws. If he'd had a tail, surely it would have been wagging.

She smirked. "You want me to open that for you?" He bobbed his head and wiggled excitedly. "I see. And do you want me to heat it up?" He bobbed his head again. "Uh-huh. And you want me to get you a pink tutu?" Of course he bobbed his head again, because she was using the same tone and he didn't _really_ understand much beyond knowing that she had magical abilities involving cans. With a grin, she reached out to pet him and then take the tun. A few seconds with a can opener got the lid off, and then she used an old lighter to heat up the underside for him.

"Alright," she called when it was ready as she ran her belt knife around the meat to loosen it. "Can-seared tuna, by the world's last chef." He got up on his knees and cupped his clawed hands, and looked for all the world like a trained seal ready to balance a ball upon his nose. She upended the meat into his hands. By then he was salivating down the broken side of his face, and his attention was riveted on her. With a skill born of careful training, he got his mouth to his hands and his hands to his mouth, and ate greedily. No food was dropped, and Snickers didn't end up chasing bits and pieces around the floor or howling and throwing himself about when said food scraps escaped under old refrigerators and sagging couches.

She settled back down and pet along his back. He wheezed his purr out between noisy munching. When he was done and had licked all the juices from his fingers, she rolled up a bit of toilet paper from the apartment bathroom and dabbed his face clean. He thrummed and tilted his head to the side to let her help him.

Snickers didn't care for sweets, found starch bland, and seemed ambivalent towards fatty substances. But after a month of eating plenty of smoked jerky, he'd grown strangely lethargic and starting gnawing on car fenders. In the interest of saving his poor teeth, she'd started researching his diet. That's how she'd learned there were five major things a hunter needed from his food which directly improved his energy levels: He needed protein, he needed an unexpected high amount of iron, he needed a ton of salt, and he needed a bit of potassium. Those were the nutrients one could find in human blood. They were also the sort of nutrients one could get quite easily from canned fish.

And lo, her kitty cat's interest in pickled sardines and canned tuna had finally been explained. And a whole lot of other questions had been raised; questions about what would happen to the infected after the green flu had run its course and wiped the world clean of human habitation. Would the zombies die out? Starve?

Snickers headed back into the kitchen while she laid out her bedroll, checked her solar batteries, and turned on her nightlight. He rummaged about in the cans for a bit longer, and brought out a collection of them by squeezing them all to his chest with his forearm and hobbling back on three legs. He tended to pick flavors _he_ thought were interesting, but she didn't complain.

The meal he'd selected for her consisted of condensed milk, peanut butter, green peas, whole date fruits, and mashed pumpkin. She fed him a spoonful of each just to taste, and then they sat together in companionable silence while she ate the rest. He tilted his head back and gave a big and toothy yawn. She rubbed his back. He took this as an invitation to flop into her lap. She scratched over his hood.

"I wish I had a goal," she confessed to her purring cat. "Somewhere to go. Someone to save. Something to do." Out of the two of them, he was probably the happier one. He didn't need his life to have meaning, he just needed food in his belly, a city to play in, and someplace dry to sleep each night. Meeting The-One-Who-Can-Open-Closed-Objects had eliminated one of the only forms of uncertainty from his life, and apparently killed off a great deal of his instinctive aggression in the process. Or something like that.

She cleaned up after dinner and then climbed into her bedroll for the evening. Snickers walked all over her before finally nosing under the bedroll and climbing into it upside down. He gave no indication that he disliked his predicament, and instead curled up in a ball on top of her feet in a position any contortionist would have envied. This was as absurd as it was normal, and she fell asleep knowing that her toes, at least, would never need to fear the dark.


	3. Flashback Chapter 3

_Flashback._

By the time the last of the men died, she wasn't gaping at their remains anymore. She wasn't even _looking_. She heard a squeal from behind her, a noise of terror better befitting a pig, followed by snapping tendons and tearing flesh, and the guttural vocalizations of feasting runners. Wet red was splashed her from behind. He was still screaming and the screams chased her.

A runner threw itself at her with a croaking bellow, and she pushed it aside with a strength she didn't actually possess, and she probably strained her arm but felt nothing. She got in the door. She heaved it shut, and she threw down the barricade, and then a thousand infected slams fell up against the other side, howling, pounding, begging to be let inside. The door held. Still, somewhere beyond, a man was screaming.

Her memory refused to conjure his name. Refused to conjure anyone's names.

Her machete clattered from her hands. She slid to the ground and hugged her knees and she was the incarnation of tears and fears and holes into the world where people could fall to and disappear from existence.

This wasn't a role she was equipped for. If someone had just told her, she would have backed up and done things differently. She would have learned a sport. Joined the military. Fallen in with the wrong crowd and joined a gang. Anything. _Anything_ to have any potential to earn her next breath.

The world spun apart, into a daze of distress. She crumpled to the ground, but then shook her head and valiantly propped herself up again. The wound in her side was bleeding, and she needed to fix that. Yeah. Yeah, that was something she could figure out how to do. Maybe. She doggedly grabbed at the handle of her machete, and crawled her way forward across the ground because she lacked the strength to do much else. Some medical supplies were stacked in the corner, and she took one case of them and opened it gingerly to inspect the contents.

She took off her jacket, and her shirt. She cleaned herself of grime and sweat, wincing and sniffling at each jab of pain. It was a bullet wound, but it wasn't bad. It hadn't gone in her, just skimmed her. She had to decide whether to let it breathe or stitch it shut. She decided to stitch it, because that was harder and scarier and maybe if she just _forced_ herself through each stitch, then she'd deserve to heal.

When it was done, and she had dabbed herself in ointments and wrapped up the injury again, she felt spent. She let her head thud back against the wall, and she stared vacantly. All the energy was gone, and so was all the fear and all the tears, and she felt fuzzy like her head was stuffed with cotton.

Something moved.

At first, she assumed it was a rat. Then she realized it was much larger, and she turned to see a sinuous humanoid figure with his belly to the ground, slinking across the middle of the room with a deathly silence. His fingertips were splayed out and overgrown with black nails like grizzly talons. He wore a low hood, torn and bloody clothing, and sleeves battened down with a wrap of gymnast's tape.

She jumped into a straighter posture, and she grabbed frantically hold of the machete and lifted it up defensively. _I'm dead._

The hunter's back went up in an arch, and he loosed the most unexpected, frightening, croaking noise she could have imagined. He sounded like the ghost from The Ring. He sounded like a crocodile, or something else without vocal cords, and the rattle of it all stretched on like a menacing, recurrent death threat. But as disturbing as the sound might have been, she did note that this was not the sound she'd expected to hear from him.

The croak trailed off slowly. The zombie seemed to be staring at her, and she was sure as hell staring at him.

After a long moment, he slowly eased forward one of his arched and splayed-fingered hands, and light finally fell across the lower portion of his face.

The lower jaw was missing on one side, along with all the flesh and muscle that had previously supported it. The majority of the upper lip was gone on that side, and the tissue of the cheek had been torn raggedly back about half an inch. The remaining half of the lower jaw was bruised and swollen to the point that there was no room inside the mouth for a tongue, which was limed in puss and dangled out the hole. Flaps of skin and tissue hung torn and full of holes. By the look of things, the hunter had been hit point blank in the face with a payload of birdshot-

-maggots! _Maggots!_ His wounds were visibly _writhing with maggots!_

She kicked back away from him in a revulsion she wasn't clear-headed enough to contain, feeling bile rising up in her mouth.

The hunter's back lifted an inch again, and his croak grew louder. When she didn't move again, he quickly leaned forward, opened his broken mouth, and seized up her bloody jacket with his remaining teeth. Then he skurried backwards into the dark, dragging his 'prey' with him.

Gun. She needed a gun. She clambered to her feet and stalked determinately about the better lit half of the safe house. Were there weapons in there? Please. Yes! A rifle, one. She took it and loaded it in the way she'd so recently been taught. There. She brought the butt of the weapon to her shoulder, and slowly crept in the direction the hunter had disappeared in.

She found a wood crate had been divested of peanut butter and medical pills. Sitting in said crate with the lid balanced atop his head, and kneading her torn jacket between his swollen gums, was the hunter. He looked much too large for his incredibly square confines, but on seeing her approach he croaked and ducked down so that the crate lid shut on top of him. She took a deep breath and nosed the barrel of her gun forward, using it to lift up the edge of the crate. She aimed for his head. He batted at the barrel of her gun. She readjusted her aim. He forced a yowl out through what she imagined were sorely inflamed vocal cords, and batted repeatedly at her gun reproachfully like a cat might bat at an encroaching vacuum cleaner hose. When she kept trying to get a bead on his head, he leaped out of the crate, bounded away from her, slowed to a haughty strut, and dragged her jacket off towards a cupboard on the far side of the room.

She stared after him in dismay.

Lacking the heart required to chase down and murder the apocalypse's one and only disinterested(?) zombie, she stumbled back over to where she'd left her medical supplies, and sank back down into a puddle of herself. Well. Now what? She knew that a person could technically off themselves with a rifle, but they had to use their toe to pull the trigger. Was that a feasible option here? Shooting herself?

She reached for her purse and wondered why she was even still carrying the thing. She overturned it, and emptied it, and watched coins and check books and phones and all sorts of other useless things go rolling away. She knocked aside cigarettes and reached for her jar of insomnia pills, because supposedly that was one way to do it- to end it without losing the nerve to end it. Falling asleep sounded like one hell of a peaceful way to go, all things considered.

Her fingers brushed up against a cat of gourmet cat food, a treat she'd purchased for the neighborhood stray on her way home from work that evening.

She slumped back into puddlehood. This wasn't fair. This wasn't fair.

When she could move again, she found a pen and paper among the supplies in the safe house, and she wrote out a letter to her family. To her mother, and father, and brother. To that stray cat she'd never see again. To her coworkers. They were dead. And she wasn't, not yet. She took her old cigarette lighter, and lit up the letter. She watched it burn. She was exhausted, and her eyes were red and salty from tears, and she probably needed to sleep.

Her eyes found the can again. The cat food can. She reached out to it, and picked it up in her hands. More tears came; she was sure she'd been out of tears. She lifted up the tab on the top of the can, and pulled the lid off. Walking on legs that felt like lead, she stumbled over to the cupboard where the hunter had disappeared, and she set down the can.

She walked back to her things. She slumped. She looked at her wallet, and the pictures of her family. She contemplated the gun and took off one of her shoes and her sock, but then picked up the insomnia medication and took four times the recommended dose. Would that be enough? As she curled up to sleep, she hoped so.


	4. Flashback Chapter 4

_Flashback - Continued_

She didn't die. Instead, when she finally woke up, she merely felt like she'd been hit by a rampaging bull. Or a truck. Or perhaps a small moon. She leaked tears onto the smooth concrete, and breathed in wretched sniffles. She wasn't dead. She was just... what? Hungover, maybe.

There were talons in front of her. Big ones. She fumbled for purchase on the ground, and then propped herself up just a bit that she might see the hunter perched right beside her, with his hands flat on the ground and his head lowered that he might stare at her.

Irony was cruel. "Shit," she mouth, just before the hunter's swollen jaws slid open. He growled in a pitchy sort of whine. She swallowed past a dry lump in her throat. "I... Um..." She needed water.

The hunter continued to stare at her, until at least sixty seconds had elapsed and she was nearly jumping out of her skin with adrenaline. Very abruptly, he leaned over and sniffed at her face, and she got a wonderful view of the extensive damage he'd suffered to the left hand side of his face. It was an ecosystem in there. Her stomach rolled, and saliva built up in the back of her mouth, and she knew she was about to vomit.

Just as quickly, he lifted his head back up, turned his back towards her, walked away, and sat there facing away from her as if to drive home just how disinteresting she was.

She gaped after him, still struggling with intense nausea.

It took a few tries for her to slowly push herself upright. Then she really did have to go puke and wash out her mouth and chug some water (and puke again, and wash out her mouth again, and then drink some water more slowly and sanely on the second try). When she'd finally sat her shaking self back down and was trying to get her bearings on what to do next, she noticed the hunter still sitting there, still blatantly... (what was he doing, exactly? Ignoring her?)

She looked away from him, and recalled that she probably needed to eat. Not that any food sounded very good, but she made it a habit to _always_ eat when she felt sick. And had she eaten much over the last few days? No, she hadn't.

Nails tapped over the ground. She glanced over to see the hunter had twisted about to look at her. The moment she noticed him, he looked away again.

 _The hell?_

Focus. Focus. Don't look at the confusing thing. Don't deal with the difficult problems. Just: Eat. She looked away from him again and got up to go inspect the crates. Peanut butter sounded like hell to her dry throat. Peaches sounded nauseatingly sweet. The only third choice was canned ham. Grimacing, she reached in to pick up a can of the meat, and noted it had been packed with baked beans. It sounded horrible in the moment, but at least it would keep her alive. And it had an easy pull tab. She opened up the lid, and grimaced at the smell of food.

Nails tapped across the ground beside her feet, and she looked down to see the hunter only a few feet away, his attention fixated on the can she was holding. His nostrils flared and lip tissue twitched with interest.

"You want it?" she croaked.

He didn't move.

After a moment, she knelt down and slowly upended the can of ham and baked beans onto the ground. She shook it to get all the sauce out, and then scooted over and away from it. The hunter's attention stayed riveted on the food. The seconds ticked by.

He slunk forward, sniffed at the pile, and batted at it slightly. When nothing terrible happened, he hunkered down right there to eat it, smearing it and sauce and beans all over the place. He ate the meat. He chased down all the beans. He licked up every last tiny milligram of sauce. He licked out the inside of the can. Only when absolutely nothing remained of the food did he turn his attention back to her. Another long pause swam slowly by. Then he turned himself about, and came up beside her, and sat down right there no more than a foot away with his head bowed and his nails tense against the floor.

She frowned at him, and at the secondary infestation going on in the broken parts of his face. He wove his weight slightly between his right and his left. Then a low, nasal, gravelly wheeze came up from the depths of his chest. In and out, it continued, in and out, repetitive and rumbling. He sat there, rocking himself, purring, _dripping_.

She lifted a hand and gingerly moved it towards him. Slowly, slowly, even though they were already so close. She touched the wraps at his arm, and then the shoulder of his hoodie, and then the hood itself. He ducked his head a little and kept purring and rocking. Because if there was anything a mammalian carnivore might possibly be expected to understand, it was that sharing food was something one only did with one's own team. Disbelief or giddiness kept her there, petting the world's ugliest hunter. Petting the world's ugliest _cat_.


	5. Flashback Chapter 5

_Flashback - Continued_

A normal animal would have grown depressed and stopped eating altogether, but every whiff Snickers caught of food had seemed to make him that more determined to survive. No matter what she gave him to nom on, he would somehow eat it. Out of pity, she stuck with the easiest and softest foods possible. If she'd been a real sadist, she would have given him the peanut butter.

It took her the better part of a week to work up the courage she needed to leave the safe house. When she stepped out that front door, he followed immediately at her heel. His suspicious glares from left to right had suggested he was no more comfortable out in the world than she was, but perhaps he'd appreciated the need to move. So they'd slunk across the city together, dodging signs of movement from shadow to shadow.

When they finally found another hole to crawl into for the night, she was exhausted. But he no sooner had crossed the threshold of the safehouse before suddenly going limp, and collapsing into a heap on the floor.

She straightened in surprise and then quickly closed the door and knelt by him. "Hey. Hey? You okay?" His talons twitched, but he did not otherwise move. Concerned, she stood up and quickly rummaged around the safehouse. Food? Maybe. The room had already sheltered survivors several times, that much was clear, but a quick and pointed survey found some cans which had rolled under a cabinet. She dragged them out used a discarded bottle opener to slowly punch holes all the way around the rim. There. Open.

She came back to her hunter's side (her cat's side?) and pushed the can up next to his face. "Hey... Can you smell that?" she asked as she pet his back. His talons shifted, and he lifted his head slightly. "Yeah," she coaxed, "it's yummy." The smell did seem to have a revitalizing effect on him, or at least it galvanized him into saving himself. He slowly propped himself upwards. His arms shook. "God." She stooped to catch him as he nearly fell into the can. "You're in a bad way. Lay on your side? Lay on your side." He slumped down on his right shoulder, breathing heavily.

"Just relax. Just... just..." she didn't know what to say to someone who was so obviously ill. The idea that a zombie could be _ill_ was ridiculous but, then, infected weren't exactly undead. She scooped up tuna on her finger, and then brought the meat up to his tortured face. "H-here..." He tried to lift his head a little. She grimaced, and pushed the meat past the fragments of his dripping mouth and onto his tongue. He tilted his head back a little, and it took him three attempts to swallow the food.

Dismayed, she sat down beside him. His face was a disaster. After days of watching him chewing slowly, determinedly, and painfully past inflamed gums and swollen facial muscles, this was the first time she had the courage to take a closer look at his condition? (Maggots, maggots maggots- ah!) _Did_ she have the courage to examine him?

She took in a long, slow breath. Then she set the tuna down and leaned over him and placed her hands hesitantly against his swollen jaw muscles. There... were those swollen glands? He whirred at her, a feliform mixture of a growl and a whine. At first he whirred quietly. Then, as she prodded at the swollen gums, he whirred louder. She glanced up towards his hood. Would he _bite_ her, or was he merely trying to communicate what was wrong? She could see his eyes, somewhat, up under the edge of the hood. They were black. Completely black, and very nearly lidless.

His nostrils flared. Then he opened his mouth slowly, stretching open hurting muscles to let her see the extent of this immense vulnerability. She grimaced at the smell of necrotic flesh, and at the sight of white worms.

"God. I..." she hesitated. Then she dug around in her new backpack, and pulled out a jar of ibuprofen. Would it help? there was _so_ much wrong with this situation. But ibuprofen was an anti inflammatory drug... and if it worked, then maybe the swelling would go down and he could at least eat, and then she might stand a chance at addressing the _next_ tier of problems afflicting him. "Just... just give me a second." She spooned up some more tuna onto her fingertips, and began pressing pills into the meat. Then she leaned over him and eased the sneaky medicine onto his tongue, and watched anxiously as he managed to swallow it.

Saline solution. She needed to find saline solution in one of these first aid kits, because that was the sort of think you were supposed to wash out wounds with. And then, if she remembered, you were supposed to snip off excess dead tissue. If she could find some tweezers and some scissors, she might be able to clean up his cheek and mouth of all those... foreign entities.


	6. Flashback Chapter 6

_Flashback - Continued_

When she woke up it was without renewed energy; she felt drained and most probably depressed. She hadn't seen another person in days. As she lay there, miserable, she became aware of a heat beside her legs. And when she finally gathered the strength to sit up and take stock of her situation, she found the hunter had crawled up beside her and was curled up on himself against the back of her knee.

Ew.

She wiped her leg clean of hypothetical zombie cooties but then sat forward and leaned over him. He was resting in a puddle of his own saliva, though that was hardly his fault given the state of his face. More importantly, the swelling looked to have been dramatically reduced. She'd cleaned up all the ragged tissue she'd been able to identify the night before, but there were many points she hadn't been able to decide what was dead and might be salvageable. It wasn't as ifinfected looked particularly _healthy_ even on their best days; covered in blisters and nodules, with a gray pallor and undertones of green instead of red.

She leaned this way and that to appraise his condition. He was alive. He had the fingers of both hands splayed over the now-empty can of tuna, so he'd managed to eat it. She reached down to touch the edge of his hood and draw it back. He jumped unexpectedly and snarled, and she jerked her fingers back just in time to avoid a snap of sharp teeth. "Hey-!"

He went still, and tilted his head back just enough that she could see his featureless black eyes on her.

"I... I only startled you?" Maybe. Hopefully. "It's okay..." She reached towards him again, and he did not growl as she touch the side of the hood. "That's a good... kitty. A goood, not-witch, accidentally-startled, but now smart-enough-not-to-bite-me kitty..."

She was asking to be jinxed right then, but irony was on her side that morning. The 'kitty' let her slip her hand into his hood and feel over the skin of his cheek. She was able to feel that he definitely still had lymph nodes along his throat, and that the nodules had shrunk noticeably in size and firmness. His nostrils flared at her as she touched him. Then he sank back down into the concrete, plopped his head into the cradle of his arms, and wheezed contentedly.

She had to smile, because this stupid _cat_ was the best thing that had happened to her in over a week. And then she had to tear up a little, because the non-hostile temperament of a severely injured special infected was the _best_ thing that had happened to her in over a week. Life- for the whole world- presently sucked.

She took in a deep breath to steady herself, and then leaned over again and set to scratching the hunter's back. He twitched a little at first, sniffled and snorted uncertainly, and then wheezed louder as a demonstration that this sort of attention was permitted to continue.

"That's a good kitty-cat," she murmured weakly.

If he'd let her, she needed to have a look at his gums and teeth now that the swelling was down. She'd see if there was any birdshot lodged in there that might be contributing to his condition. And she needed to have a look down his throat. If the green flu was still causing mucus build up post mutation, for example, then the extra swelling might be making it difficult for him to breathe. If that was the case, every house in america had stocked up on expectorants over the last few days, and she could certainly manage to loot a bottle of the stuff. Her success with the ibuprofen was bolstering her confidence, and at least this gave her some sort of milestone to achieve.

Her nails caught on a tear in his hoodie and he winced slightly but did not stop his 'purring.' She glanced down at him and frowned. Was something else wrong? After a moment, she leaned about him and found the back hems of his hoodie and shirt, ragged and oily and dirty as they were. She lifted up the material, and immediately saw rashes everywhere. Startled, she pulled up the fabric a little further, and then tried to get a look through the torn front of the hoodie at his arm.

Dead skin had built up on his flesh at a much faster rate than she'd have expected in a human. The dead skin cracked open into lesions everywhere his skin folded over on itself, such as at the armpits, neck, and elbows. It was also particularly bad in places such as the hem, where wet and dirty clothing had chafed. He had oozing sores and warts all along his skin, like a person with severe eczema who had contracted a bad fungal infection.

 _This_ was a project all on its own! This needed sponges, epson salts, liquid bandages, a loofah, a _sander_ , lotion, oil-!

She looked down at his face (what was left of it), and took in a slow breath. "You know, you're very lucky you have me," she informed him. "As clearly you have been stripped of really every instinct- aside from _eating_ \- which any animal would possibly need to know about surviving in the wild. You can jump off roofs and land without injury, but are completely unaware of your own body, and do not even appear to know you have thumbs."

Her companion just kept wheezing his eerie purr, and left the bigger things like the rationalization of the green flu and speculation on infected psychology to her.


	7. Flashback Chapter 7

_Flashbacking for So Long, you Probably Forgot What Was Happening in the Present_

The next day came and went, and still the hunter remained largely incapacitated by fever and inflammation of the mouth. She left the safe house then, because its supplies were insufficient for her needs and it was time to move on. She spent the day working her way to a super market, feeding herself, and holing up in a back corner.

She tried to think about the names of the people who had taught her to load a rifle and shoot it, or wield a machete without jarring her elbow and dropping the weapon. But she couldn't remember anything. Nothing. Names and faces were blotted out till only voices remained, voices that offered anxious advice and screamed out in agony at the end. Their faces and names were replaced by sun chips and chocolate bars, layered over by whatever random access information needed temporary housing in her brain.

She curled up to sleep.

A wall stocked with cat food, aluminum foil, and saran wrap stared out at her from across the hall.

Some strange thing like _guilt_ drove her back to the storehouse in the wee evening hours when surely every other moving thing could see more easily than she could, and whilst zombies in general were enjoying a sun-free sky. The slipped shakily through the doors after sidestepping a crying witch, and slowly eased the door shut so as not to startle her with any loud noises.

"Kitty...?" she whispered into the darkness, and wondered if she was insane.

A wheeze drifted up from beside the door, and she looked down to see him just beside her ankle, curled up against the side of the safe house with his black gaze turned up towards her. He wheezed again, and choked a little, and then purred, and purred.

She knelt slowly down beside him, and gathered his disgusting head slowly up in her arms, and felt his throat and the tears in his face and the warts and excema scales about his collar bone and the back of his neck. She swallowed past a hard lump in her throat, and then scooted and tugged until she'd gotten her knees underneath him and his head and shoulders into her lap. He was so filthy, and so pathetic, and he _drooled_ , and she pet over him and sagged her weight into the wall of the safe house.

"Okay," she affirmed. "I won't abandon you, and you don't eat me. _Capisce_? I got some tweezers, Listerine, an expectorant, and dental picks. And some sulfur soap for your skin."

Kitty oozed contentedly into her, and didn't even beg for food.


	8. Flashback Chapter 8

_Yup, Still Flashbacking_

It had been two days since she'd seen a maggot crawl out of that ugly, lopsided, torn and pitted mouth of his, and three days since she'd dug out the last pellet of bird shot with tweezers originally designed for pulling out porcupine quills. By then the tongue actually looked to be healing, which surprised her her even amidst constant reminders that green-flu zombies were still rather 'alive.' Wasn't it evidence enough enough of life that 'kitty' seemed to be fevering?

But if a week of digging about in a hunter's fanged mouth with tweezers and dental floss had taught her anything, it was that 'kitty' had no particularly inescapable urge to chomp down on human fingertips, which raised the question of why every other green flu zombie seemed to operate on a nom-first-and-ask-questions-later sort of policy. Well, that labeling wasn't entirely true: Witches appeared to be more defensive than anything else. Did Tanks get irritated with things other than humans? She didn't know. Who could have known? Who exactly had insight into how zombies worked when uninfected weren't around? No one. The world had gone to hell, and there was no one to conduct scientific inquiry on these topics. There were no answers. Existence was lack of answers. Existence was chaos.

Existence was grounded by a routine: forage, eat, feed kitty, work on kitty's face, work on kitty's skin, sleep. Forage, eat, feed kitty, work on kitty's face, work on kitty's skin, sleep. Every new object had two sets of qualifications to be judged by: a) was it food? b) might it help repair a fevering, ill, and damaged hunter? It wasn't that she was particularly _good_ at her job- it took her days just to realize she ought to be giving him water- but an ailing 'kitty' gave her something to care about.

She gathered some clean linens while foraging, and laid them out to work on. She cut his clothing off with scissors and bathed him with water mixed with sulfur soaps and sandalwood and anti-fungal ointment and Epson salts; anything to try and exfoliate layers and layers of harlequin-syndrome-esque skin build up and prevent gangrene. He didn't seem to like being without clothing, and rolled himself up in the linens like an anxious burrito, which suited her mental image of him just fine. She poked around the tissues of that damaged mouth every day, and eventually found a book which explained to her the maggots may have saved his life by eating out dead tissue. A little bit of pink seemed to be coming back in places- just enough to wonder if he might be mending.

It had been two days since she'd seen a maggot, and three days since she'd dug out the last pellet of bird shot.

And when she came home from foraging, her hunter was simply gone. His fever had broken. His face had started healing. His skin infections had been largely wiped out. Clearly, he had been able to stand.

And so now all that was left to her were soiled linens, and many, many, many discarded cans of food. At least he hadn't eaten her.

But the loss of any sense of purpose hit her so hard that she ended up curled up in the floor in the fetal position with her flashlight in hand, crying for her mother and asking God why he'd sent such a flood to kill them all.

...

* * *

She woke when something squishy and wet slapped up against her face. Survival instincts and general disgust made her recoil from the touch, and she peered groggily forward past eyelids dry and raw from saline.

The tip of a Smoker tongue, blistered and boiled, was hanging right there in front of her eyes, bobbing up and down like the long tail end of a black slug with its tip twitching and coiling reflexively. Survival instincts were not enough to stem the scream which shot out from the depths of her lungs, especially not when the smoker tongue lolled forward and smacked her right upside the face again. Scream she did, and loudly at that, as she leaped to her feet and fumbled blindly for any weapon at all.

The Smoker tongue did not pursue her, however. Instead, a sloppy, wheezy little chortle leaked out from the air above her.

She looked up. There, perched among shattered glass and broken boards in a high window at the top of the safe-house, was the dark profile of a hunter. He looked to be wearing raincoat, and was using the hood to shield his eyes. He wasn't wearing any pants, which gave her a _wonderful_ underside view of nothing worth getting particularly excited about, but which all the same really ought to be put away somewhere. He had one set of blood-encrusted toe-claws buried in the decapitated head of a Smoker, and was using his other hand to dangle the tongue down like a fishing lure or cat toy. And most importantly, he was missing a significant chunk of his face.

"Wh..." she breathed, gaping up uncertainly towards him. He looked healthy and alert. Did he remember she'd helped him? He wheezed a little harder, a sound she'd come to associate with contentment. Her fashlight illuminated the lower half of his face, and saw the remainder of his lips had curled into a tight, almost mischevious grin. He snorted and sniffed, and grinned and grinned and grinned.

"Y-you..." she hesitated. "What are... what are _you_ giggling about?"

He gave the tongue a little wiggle and she jumped. He wheezed, his tattered lips parting to show off more pointy teeth (what was left of them), as he chortled and hissed all in one.

"Oh yeah? Laugh it up Fuzzball." Her voice didn't sound worried, not even to her own ears. She sounded as if she were drawling. As if she were _teasing_. She'd just made a Starwars reference.

He moved then, dropping the Smoker head off the wall behind him, and the tongue zipped up after it as it splattered some place on the outside. He crawled vertically down the wall, his dark talons curling into the boards and leaving little gouges behind as he rather effortlessly slithered down to the ground floor. He came up to her, more lizard than man, and- amidst a long and rumbling wheeze- he rubbed up his shoulder and side against her leg. He smelled of blood and rain and mud.

She craned over and gingerly touched at the edeg of his hood. He surprised her in twisting about swiftly to look straight at her with bared teeth, and she jerked back her hadn away from him like lightning. She could see his eyes at this range, lidless black orbs, and she should see the skin about them was creased in primitive joy. He closed his teeth, his lips curled, and he snorted and snuffled out another happy wheeze.

"You think scaring me's funny?" she reproached him. "Huh? That's what you think, Giggles?"

He hummed, and butted his face harmlessly into her leg, and snickered some more. _That_ was the word for what he was doing: _Snickering_.

She knelt slowly, touching his hood and then looking at his filthy hands at feet. He'd cut or scraped himself in several places but seemed not to notice or at least not to mind. "I thought you'd left," she noted more somberly as she pet over the side of his jaw. She could feel no lymph nodes, now. "You gonna eat me?"

He butted his head into her shoulder again, and rubbed up against her, and if he'd had a tail it would surely be flicking about all superciliously behind him.

She twisted about and rummaged in their surroundings for an unopened can of processed chicken. Immediately he stopped laughing and gave a little eager noise, and turned himself about to stare at her magical can-opening hands with rapt attention. She pulled the lid free and upended the result in front of him. Her 'kitty' pounced upon the meat, pressing his damaged face into the mound of white chunks and gobbling them all up in a very messing fashion. She pet him. He leaned into her as he at.

"I'm calling you _Snickers,_ " she told him. "That's your name now. Got it, Snickers? And if you think it's fun pranking me, you just remember who it is who _feeds_ you now."

Snickers lifted up his head, extended a pointed tongue easily eight inches in length, and proceeded to give her the single biggest, sloppiest, goopiest lick she had ever had the misfortune to endure.


	9. Chapter 9

_Present Day. Our intrepid heroes were barricaded up in a city so vacant that no zombies showed up even while she was running through the streets calling for him. We can presume this means it's been a long time since the initial green flu outbreak, and long after the setting of the two Left 4 Dead games._

Snickers crawled out of her bedroll somewhere around dawn, and went to stretch himself out before the apartment's broken windows. He buried his (already hooded) face into his forearms, and soaked in the heat of the morning sunrise.

Without eyelids, and with pupils as wide around as the socket, Hunters were indisputably equipped for hunting in the darkness. But even when the sky was overcast, Snickers relied much more on other senses than on vision; and he wouldn't go out prowling under a naked sun at all- not unless she blindfolded him.

Then of course he was a cat, after all, so he _would_ lay out basking in a sunlit room all day if she let him- provided he felt safe and that his face was decently covered.

Maybe today was just that sort of day, though: a rest day. Well, then she wanted to steal some sunshine, too. She rolled sleepily off of her mat, dragged it over to the window, and bundled herself up against Snicker's flank. He was happy enough to be a pillow, and he was clean enough not to stink. She dozed, content enough with the present to pause worrying about the larger state of the world. Ranging about with only a Hunter for companion could be a lonely way to live out the rest of her days but, at the very least, it was better than dying suddenly, painfully, and alone.

She slept in several hours, and then lazed about conducting small but long-overdue maintenance work on various articles of gear: oiling hinges, stitching tight loose corners, gluing odds and sharpening ends. When her rear end began protesting such an abnormal lack of exercise, she got herself up and paced about and stretched. Snickers yawned and stretched back and forth, rolling about on his back with his arms and legs all curled up.

Even though Snickers had once been human, the Green Flu had changed his anatomy enough to classify him as a different species . He was a _Hunter_ : His tendons and muscles rested easiest in a 'coiled' position instead of an 'extended' one. The curves of his shoulder-blades and clavicles had been mutated and distorted on even a skeletal level. His skin was not smooth; he sported thickened, coarse ridges across the length of his back and and limbs that reminded her faintly of Crocodile scutes, but which were at least clean of lesions and grime.

Most of Snickers' competition wasn't as lucky on that last point, and suffered from some degree of fungal infection. After all, few of them had the luxury of being scrubbed with a luffa by a friendly human helper, now did they? On the rare occasion that she had a fresh Hunter corpse to inspect (she tried to avoid confrontation) she'd seen what looked to be a wide range of various superficial mutations, skin infections, and overtaxed immune systems. Disease and Charles Darwin, she wagered, would pick off a great number of special infected if food-scarcity didn't get them first. That thought was humbling: that the world would go on turning without humans, leaving only feral zombie apex predators for evolution to act upon-

-Evolution required generations. Could zombies breed? There was nothing about the Green Flu to explicitly suggest they were sterile, and the diseased seemed to exhibit enough variability to suggest that somewhere, somehow, one individual from one subspecies would end up with all the mechanisms necessary to produce evil zombies babies. All it would take after that would be enough luck for the offspring to make it to adulthood and keep breeding. Snickers lived off tuna, and so zombies could hunt animals. Nature would find a way.

Maybe 'humanity' still lingered in the zombie genetic code, somewhere. Maybe luck and statistics would recreate intelligence from what remained.

 _What is the point of being so damn morbid?_ Was humanity even dead? No one was directing radio waves her way, and no one had been for quite some time. But perhaps the rest of the world had simply given up on North America?

Sometimes she worried that if she stopped talking out loud to Snickers, she might forget how to speak.

"But that's right, it's past bath time, isn't it?" she startled herself out of her own melancholy. He whirred peaceably, and rolled onto his stomach. Once weekly she _did_ try to get his whole outfit off, but on the days between she always made sure to at least sponge-bathe his joints. Rituals helped her count the days, the weeks, the months, the seasons...

"Do you ever think about the future?" she asked him rhetorically, as she bundled his hoodie up against his shoulders, and scrubbed and scrubbed to his persistent purrs. "Am I really the only thing left _in all the known universe_ still capable of any big questions at all?"

The way Snickers purred louder suggested he was actively and intentionally discouraging her from feeling lonely. And that, well, that would have to be enough.


	10. Chapter 10

The dog, sick with mange and splattered with Boomer pheromones, was doomed. The Runners pursued, howling and gnashing their teeth in excitement, until at last they cornered it just under a building. They closed in without hesitance. The dog bit at them, they bit back harder, and it was several tears later before the tussle eventually put an end to its shrieks. After the grotesque sounds of phlegmy coughing and tearing flesh wafted gently up many stories above, to where she and Snickers watched the zombie procession from the safety of darkness.

The bulk of the party was still coming.

Like bees about their queen, the crowd of zombies swarmed upon the Boomer and its unmistakable aroma. They followed wherever it tottered upon its fat legs, mumbling incoherently to themselves as its drool and pheromones dribbled down the crevasses and boils of its belly. Whether it had once been male or female was difficult to ascertain; its saliva had long since destroyed all clothing and hair, and what remained of its flesh bulged in a saggy, swollen, and asymmetrical manner.

Its arrival fueled a growing feeding frenzy, but Boomer elbowed smaller bodies out of the way with easy sweeps of its massive arms. It plucked the canine remains one-handed out from the swarm with runners still clinging to the broken limbs, and then bit into the torn with a cacophony of crunches and pops. Not all of said pops seemed to come exclusively from the meal, either; some, surely, had to do with the broken boils and ooze which leaked down the sides of its head.

Above there was only silence. Calm, poised silence, pregnant with readiness that something unexpected might occur, but otherwise still and almost serene as it waited for the danger to pass.

She was hugging the wall against the window's right side, with only the nose of her suppressor visible in the moonlight as it steadied her aim against the sill. Her scope let her see everything she could want to see of the scene below (and plenty she didn't). Her Hunter was ready at a second window, alert but unmoving, his arm draped almost casually over the length of the sill and his chin resting upon his shoulder. He had been her tutor in this: in learning that safety came with going unseen and, therefore, unheard.

She'd never been a strong woman, and the Green Flu had forced her to confront the sad reality of how very little she had been able to really carry over an average day of post-apocalyptic horror. Her weapon count and ammunition numbers had dwindled in face of a need for water purification hardware, sleeping pads, and medicines. Multiple guns had been rendered impossible, as had carrying any dependable melee weapon. Her future had been sealed when she'd chosen a single-shot, long-barreled rifle: she'd ever after survive only by the virtues of patience and positioning. But she and Snickers were a team in that: they worked quietly, and efficiently; they took down isolated targets only in ideal circumstances; and they relied on ambush tactics, bottle necks, vantage points, stalling tactics, and stumbling blocks. If the Boomer noticed them, for instance, she would need to kill it in a single shot. She and Snickers couldn't fight fair in any way- not when their party numbered only _two_ against legions, and an unimpressive two at that.

It began to rain, faintly. The breeze picked up, so that the air was no longer so thick and muggy. She waited, feeling strangely like any normal bookworm curled up in the safety of their apartment window as a late summer storm blew in. The Boomer began to move again, as the remains of its meal were consumed in a guttural feeding frenzy. It straightened, wobbled, and then began tottering on northward through the main road of town. Its swarm inevitably swallowed, with some members dragging tattered fragments of their kill along behind them- bits of bone, hair, sinew, and tendon.

When the crowd was long gone, she eased the nose of her rifle back into the apartment, and glanced over at Snickers. His nostrils flared as he sniffed noiselessly at the rain for a short while. Then he eased his legs out in front of him, and rubbed his toes together as if to work out tension or jitters. A short while later, he pushed himself up to a squat and crossed the room to join her. Snickers didn't walk like a man; he clung to walls and rafters for additional support like a monkey, child, or invalid. He crouched before her and pawed gently at her arm.

'I watched you today,' he seemed to say without having any of the words to do so. 'Have you been thinking too much again? Do I need to pay close attention to you tomorrow?' There was still something clever about Snickers, in the same way there was something clever about service animals. Now and then he reminded her of it, in the way he stared, and in the way his eyes squinted while he was thinking.

"I'm okay," she told him. If she wasn't, he'd know from the sound of her voice better than she did.

He bunted gently up against her shoulder, and then curled up into her and half on top of her- big heavy inconsiderate feline thing that he was!- to get some rest.


	11. Chapter 11

The city's utter desolation told a story of a time soon after the infection, where a military installation to the north must have done something to draw the attention of every zombie in town. With the exception of one migratory Boomer and its posse, infected mutants looked to have abandoned the region. But she reasoned: If guns had drawn zombies north, then guns could draw them south again. Suppressor or no suppressor, she didn't trust the volume of her rifle or the psychological allure of such unexpectedly juicy loot: Prudence would necessitate a retreat.

"You need to be on your toes," she cautioned Snickers as the two of them slunk out eagerly together into streets. Today would entail replenishing a few generic supplies and then actually scouting out a _hospital._ For once, buildings which ought to have been death traps in another town might actually yield invaluable resources. "If it doesn't catch a whiff of us, I won't have to shoot it. If I don't have to shoot it, we might get lucky."

Snickers huffed affirmatively and spidered up the porous the brick wall of an old firehouse to get a better vantage point. There were few climbing surfaces he liked _quite_ so much as he liked brick. Stucco, maybe, but one usually didn't see that in cities. By contrast, skyscraper glass was a plague on all of the Hunter strain, as it rendered their claws useless, provided no visual cover, removed allowances for mistakes, and left them dependent on depth perception and leg strength alone. Smokers, Smokers liked skyscrapers.

Nh, her mind had wandered again, and Snickers knew it before she did and hissed at her. Well, this was the sort of evidence that demonstrated she'd never been cut out to be a ranger. But that didn't matter: whatever cards life dealt, those were the cards a woman had to play with. _Focus. Breathe. Quiet everything down inside. Let your mind blank out and your senses blend into everything._

Birds. Bits of grass, broken through the concrete, fluttering in a gentle autumn breeze. Heat: damnably hot even for early morning. Shadow, cover, shadow, cover; post, garbage bin, car. They made their way across the city one obstacle at a time.

Ahead of them, a tin can rolled across the ground. Snickers was on the scene first, crawling near it across the architectural ornamentation of a bank. She saw the lone 'normal' infected shortly after he did, and then got to witness a beautiful jump as he cleared two dozen yards and landed flawlessly with toes and fingers leading. He pinioned his target down with a wet crunch, and then tore it in half at the midsection. Blood ended up everywhere. He tracked it about in happy whirls, as if marking territory in red, and then galloped back to her and crawled up onto a car to sniff at the air and peer around for additional hostiles.

She hurried quietly over to the body to make sure that the zombie had actually died- _always double tap-_ and then glanced back at where her Hunter had one foot lifted in the air and was licking his toe claws clean and pulling chunks of flesh loose from between them with his teeth. Well, that was always a delightful sight. Thinking back, she couldn't remember when Snickers had first started trying to groom himself after kills. Four months ago? Five? He finished and galloped along after her, where he paused only a moment to rub his shoulder up against her hip and then took to the heights of nearby buildings once more.

"Keep me safe," she murmured, only just realizing that her new reluctance to use the rifle had just severely handicapped her ability to defend herself. Either she needed a temporary melee weapon, or she simply had to trust in the quality of her silencer. It was a nice silencer, after all; she'd nearly paid an arm and a leg for it.


	12. Chapter 12

Was this what he thought it was? He halted and turned it over. Well, it was elongated, and single-barreled. The aperture was about the right size for her flame capsules, and it seemed to have a quieting scarf wrapped about the neck of it. Interesting! BFF ought to see it! He snatched it up and twisted about, deciding the fastest route back from where he'd came.

As strange as it sounded, there were actually different kinds and qualities of firestick, and they all had differently sized flame capsules. BFF would stall mid-hunt to pick up and inspect new firesticks she found amid the forage. Occasionally she switched out her current favorite for something better, but her choices had looked similar for ages: long, quiet, and deadly. He suspected, with a note of pride, that she might have chosen these sorts of sticks _specifically_ to ape _his_ way of stalking prey: sticking to shadows and high vantage points, and picking targets carefully.

He twisted his way through the handholds and footholds of the concrete remnants, and emerge on an overlook that gave him a good vantage point of his pack-mate. She was hunched down turning over a piece of forage in her hands, with her head tilting this way and that. To him it smelled like metal, but to her it likely had some interesting, unlockable potential. She understood found-items better than he did, but she had another advantage over him too: She- and maybe all demons?- could _envision_ things. Possibilities. Demons could put objects together and give those objects new properties.

She wasn't demonic.

The first night he'd sat beside her, it had not been out of fearlessness. He had been very obviously bluffing confidence over his injuries, and had been hot, in pain, and hungry. But she had shared food, and neglected to kill him. So he'd crept close and adjusted himself slowly to the violently hostile 'markers' of her scent to try and learn what her intentions were. A hunch- and maybe a desperation for comfort- had led him to realizing those hostility-markers had been _lies_.

BFF was not violent. She was more frugal with firesticks than he was with claws. She was more likely to pet than she was to nip.

That first night, he had sat with her and he had watched her suffer in the confines of her head, sleeping sleeplessly, tormented and perhaps slightly insane. She had chattered through it all in that alien, shrieky voice of hers, and she _had_ , for all the world, looked like a demon as she'd tossed and turned about.

But she had just shared food with him, and she had just neglected to kill him, and he'd stayed in quiet vigil as he'd tried to figure her out. Ever since that day he had learned that BFF was _gentle_ for all that her body language and smell were so horribly awry. She liked to fix things. She liked to make things. She was very responsive to affection, and could scratch things quite efficiently without rending holes in them. She seldom got terribly irate and, when she did, she never lashed out with more than a smack. She gave him proper space when _he_ was irate (Though anything so much as _growling_ at her seemed incredibly unnecessary, even amid a hunger fog...)

A team. He and BFF were a team. He took care of the here-and-now, and she went off with that bizarrely capable but somewhat distressed head of hers and envisioned important goals to steer them towards. She kept them supplied with food and clean water, took care of their health, picked out excellent clothing without tearing any of it, and explained to him that rolling about in entrails to mask his scent was only a good idea _sometimes_ because it left him itchy and soggy afterwards, which usually mandated a switch in jacket.

He felt calm. Nevermind what she was; After so much anger and frustration and pain and heat and disorientation and hunger and hatred, BFF's big-picture oversight and mothering affection were the only things that soothed and secured.

He crawled down to her, the new firestick still clutched safely between his teeth. He couldn't quite tell, but he had a funny feeling it might just be a _good_ one.


	13. Chapter 13

This was a circuit board, the sort of which one might expect in a school science project or research prototype.

She turned it over and over in her hands, wondering if it had been damaged and wondering also if it was time to start reading up on technology to see if she could spark some life into the old wires and devices before they decayed into the post-apocalyptic landscape. As strange as it sounded, the End of the World sure did involve a lot of reading. Reading about herbalism, about medical remedies, about how to set broken bones, about how to repair simple mechanical devices, about how to build a primitive generator, about how to purify water, on and on and on. The most useful books were the ones that had very nearly gone out of publication with the dawn of the internet: Yellow Pages. The only way to find specialty shops like hunting stores or gun shops without blundering down a thousand city streets attracting every zombie in the nation was to look up where everything was in the Yellow Pages.

A pleased snort interrupted her thoughts, and she looked to see Snickers crawling down to meet her with a- what exactly was clasped between his teeth? She waved him close and then took the firearm gingerly from his grasp, looking over the length of it with steadily increasing wonderment. If she remembered her tattered gun mags right, this was a military grade sniper rifle. Yes, yes it was: The obvious Barrett Firearms logo on the side proved it. "Where did you get _this_?" she breathed, intrigued but uncertain if it would prove useful.

Once upon a time, she would have supposed the sniper rifle to be the ideal weapon for any sneaky survivor who liked to stay hidden in tall buildings. But back when she and Snickers still occasionally seen signs of other humans, she'd watched (and heard) some poor sod demonstrate just the opposite: sniper rifles broke the sound barrier, and that ensured they always made _incredibly_ loud booms. Well, someone else had learned all this that the hard way so that she hadn't needed to, and while his safe-house had been swarmed by untold thousands of undead, she'd gotten very grisly inspiration to start reading whatever gun magazines she could manage to get hold of.

Hmm, but this sniper rifle had a sound suppressor on it. What was the point of that? She peered down the barrel and was surprise to see how wide the weapon had been chambered. These bullets had been massive. How massive? What exactly had this weapon been firing?

"Can you show me where you got this?" She looked to Snickers, hoping to learn more. "Show me? Please show me?" Snickers understood her request and crawled eagerly back up to his wall. Of course, she had to find a more easily traversal path by which to follow him.

Snickers led her around several buildings and then up into a makeshift birds nest where only blood and offal remained of the person who'd once owned the rifle. She searched around and found a few unspent bullets, which she gathered up greedily to inspect. They weighed in her hand like ingots of lead. Her .22 long rifle bullets were _tiny_ beside it. More important than the size of the round, however, was what its size, shape, and manufacturer told her about the rifle. _This_ is _a Whisper .500_ _cartridge._ _This gun is for firing subsonic ammunition. It will be nearly silent._

If she was careful- God, if she was careful!- these monstrously heavy slugs would let her kill a special infected from half a world away, with nothing whatsoever to point the way home. How many were there? She gathered them all and laid them out before her: Twelve. Twelve bullets for a rifle of incredible properties with a gigantic payload which she would likely never again find ammunition for. She dare not trade in her main rifle for this, because .22 long ammunition was trivial to find and she could only carry so much of it at a time. Then, could she handle the extra weight, and maybe take a second gun with her for short while? Surely she could keep it long enough to try and kill the Boomer?

She needed this. It was enormous. It was beautiful. It was black and pointy and somehow reminded her of Batman. She hoarded the bullets into her satchel, and pulled the sexy sniper rifle over her shoulder. Snickers looked thrilled.

"You found this. You are a _genius,_ Snickers, _"_ she gushed in a tone people had once reserved only for babies and kittens. "Who's the smartest Hunter in all the land? Who is? _You are_!"

He puffed up under all this attention, recognizing it as praise even before she reached over to hug him. He huffed and mumbled happily, and gave her a little lick on the temple, and then rolled over and nearly on top of her to demand payment for his incredible mental acumen. This actually proved to be a terrible idea on his part, because he got a face-full of direct sun-light in doing so, and then immediately curled up in a hard flinch.

"Hey now! Carefule!" she laughed, tugging his hood down low and holding it there. She'd once seen a hoodless hunter stumble around in broad daylight, blind and screaming, until the pain had finally compelled it to rake out its own eyes. Hunters didn't have eyelids, and while some appeared capable of seeking out hooded clothing, shading their faces with an arm, or at least sleeping in some shadowed place during the day, others suffered from Green Flu variations that left them incredibly handicapped. Doubtless there was more than one blind hunter still crawling about out there, somewhere in the world.

When (presumably) the stars faded from his vision, Snickers gave a bashful mumble and folded a forearm over his head to keep the hood down himself. She pet him along the flank and reassured his bruised pride: "Don't worry, I still think you're a genius." He hummed at the sound of her voice. She took the opportunity to have a good look at his old injuries in decent lighting

As frightening as Snickers' mouth was, his face had once been much, much worse. Daily maintenance had brought back full usage of what remained, and some kind of zombie regeneration had grown in cartilage and muscle up to partially support the jaw where proper bone had been obliterated. The entire area was always a healthy-looking whirl of healing pink and light green. Where one cheek had once been little more than dangling scraps of tattered flesh, tissue now stretched tight between a number of large triangular holes. Gum had built up on the top of the jawbone itself, and at least two teeth had reappeared on the top jaw where damage had been less extensive. She wondered if one day he might heal the whole of the wound.

She traced the tissue thoughtfully. He captured and teethed harmlessly on her fingertips, gentler and much more careful than even the sweetest-tempered of puppies (although with even more drooling). He'd done this before. She wondered if it was teething, or a suckling instinct, or if her long history of tending to his mouth had tied some sort of 'reassuring' instinct to the feel of her fingers about his teeth. It was times like these, when Snickers so very obviously could bite her hand clean off but didn't, when he'd just shown off his intelligence but still seemed mesmerized by her, that she reflected upon stories like _I am Legend_ , and pondered how little she really understood about the infected.


	14. Chapter 14

The cat hissed and arched it's back, feinting small aggressive shuffles towards him. Without missing a beat, Snickers did likewise. This was unexpectedly sociable behavior from a human-sized entity, and so the cat growled warningly, bluffed a forward lunge, and pawed at the air. Snickers growled and pawed back. The cat whirred with experimental hostility. Snickers whirred just the same way. Hmm, these were uncannily good social skills from a two-legger...

Reassured and emboldened by this man-thing's unexpected adherence to the proper greeting protocols expected of more civilized beings, The cat shrieked angrily and sniffed the air. Snickers did the same thing, which was a good sign. Fourteen rounds of forward shuffling, forward lunges, hissing, howling, and growling ensued- because fifteen would have been too many, twelve was insulting, and thirteen was only appropriate when greeting black cats.

Then, with preemptive rituals completed, feline and Hunter set to establishing an initial acquaintanceship by sniffing each other with intermittent growls and paranoid arched backs that would permit them to flee at a moment's notice, as was only right and prudent for anyone to do.

When each determined the other was neither food nor a competitive interloper, the cat made an impulsive decision likely brought on by the stresses and strains of post-apocalyptic living: it decided to shortlist him as a potential friendship candidate. To demonstrate this, it sprinted away, leaped onto a box, slowed to a leisurely stroll with its tail in the air and its butt fully presented, paused, and glanced back at them. When no mongrel pursuit followed, it sat down and began grooming itself to demonstrate that it found them boring but non-offensive. Friendly overtures were now welcome, of course, but should only be attempted after a sufficient period of reflection for both parties: say, two to three weeks. Alright, five days, but only for _him_ , and then only if he was still in the area by then. Truly, Snickers ought to have been honored.

Snickers likewise gave it the cold shoulder, as was only polite, but then apparently didn't know what to do after that. After a moment of staring at nothing, he perked up a bit and then slowly peered back over to where she had gone forgotten during the course of this Hunter/Cat cultural bonding event. After a moment he padded over to her, looking somewhat confused but entirely satisfied, and ignoring the cat just as politely as the cat was ignoring him.

She sighed and shook her head at him in dismay. "What I wouldn't give for YouTube, or Instagram, or... Or anything, right now. They'd have to re-brand it to make it morbidly comic in these trying times: YouTubez. See what I did there? That was a 'z' I added on the end, not an 's'. No? Nothing? Infectagram. GreenTube. YouFlu."

He didn't understand a word she was saying, and was probably wondering why she couldn't be as proficient in sane rational communication as that cat over there. She mimed taking a photo of him with a smart phone she obviously no longer possessed, and sadly posted the imaginary video onto an imaginary Facebook to share with her dead friends and family.

Snickers squinted, opened his mouth, shuffled in place, and then abruptly squeaked out a meow. She nearly jumped out of her skin and stared wide-eyed at him. The corners of his damaged mouth turned up, and he wiggled again before yowling out another long, excellently formulated meow.

She gaped at him for a moment. "Why haven't you haven't so much as tried to mimic a single human word in all the time I've known you!?"

He meowed luxuriously, she slapped a hand over her face, and he broke out into the wheezy chortles and giggles that were his namesake.

"I hate you Snickers," she grumbled as he rubbed affectionately up against her legs. "Really, I do. Completely. All the way." He brushed up against her fingers and she cradled his head to her side and scratched under his ear. He grinned toothily (and slightly not) up at her. "You won't try to mimic me? Not once? What about saying: 'I love you, Super Special Favorite Can-Opener.' Eh? Eh?"

Snickers wouldn't play her game, and instead twisted and turned as he enjoyed the good scratching. This time he was smart enough not to flop on her, at least.


	15. Chapter 15

She snacked on a low quality blueberry muffin that had clearly been bombed with preservatives at its time of manufacture, and for that reason alone had survived into the present day. The taste of bread- whatever the quality- was like heaven these days. Beside her, Snickers was humming and mumbling as he enjoyed a heaping meal of fried dace and tomato sauce. She'd even found a real ceramic plate to feed him on, and fully expected to watch him lick every drop of mummy goodness off its surface (and perhaps chew on it a little) before he finished.

The two of them had gotten back to 'base' just before sunset, and she'd had enough time to light a small little fire to heat up his food before the glimmer of light might have given bright enough contrast to draw attention. Snickers was a sucker for hot food, and he was the only one around for her to spoil

The city was theirs.

To recap for herself: They had a roaming Boomer to avoid, and a few scattered Normals to dispose of, but thus far their surroundings had proven a paradise. The city featured all the resources they would ever need to start on many an interesting project (could she explain in words what joy she'd felt when she'd spied the door to the hospital's generator room?), coupled with danger levels lower than one might expect of a secluded farm house.

And what were the dangers? Primarily: getting cocky and making a mistake. The city was not completely vacant, after all, and she and Snickers would also be living under a continuous threat of zombies returning from the north to investigate any loud noises. Still, the overall conditions made this an _ideal_ place to stop, live, and plan for awhile.

Her previous overarching goal had been to get herself and Snickers south for upcoming winter, but that was a now complete. It had been no easy project given the condition of bridges and cities; An open highway and a bit of gasoline were a free ticket to the illusion of safety and progress, as even the lowliest sedan or hatchback could outrun a Tank on a flat stretch of asphalt at full speed. But as soon as one came across a seven lane pile-up of cars, highways quickly lost their allure- often immediately after having streaked loud and fast across open terrain in full view of a lot of hungry hostiles.

But the two of them had made it, and made incredible timing at that. By now they were caught amid a mid autumn heat wave somewhere south of Atlanta, and while Georgia got nippy in February, it would be nothing next to getting encased in eight feet of snow upstate New York with a carnivorous roommate who was cranky, injured, and blinded by all the sparkling white ground cover.

(If there was any firm proof that Snickers loved her, it was in all the canned squash, crushed iron supplements, whey powder, and pork bullion she'd gotten away with feeding him on otherwise hopeless days. He'd certainly done a number on the first cow he'd seen afterward, and splashed about in the mess for hours like a toddler in a ball pit. Put things in perspective.)

Snickers paused in his eating and glared suspiciously up towards the ceiling. He was quiet for a moment, head cocked to the side, and then went back to his food at a slower paced nomming speed, as if listening for something.

Hmm. What snuck about on tall buildings even when no food was readily nearby? It could have been a Normal trapped in a closet somewhere, but she figured she ought to plan for the worst: Hunters, Jockeys, Smokers, and strains yet unseen an unnamed. She'd keep an eye out.


	16. Chapter 16

Snickers growled and jerked his head to the side, and she bolted after him. It had taken them two solid weeks for them to find this damn thing, and now they were close enough that even _she_ could hear it's coughing fits. For all of two weeks, Snickers had been randomly dropping whatever he was doing to crawl off and investigate smells, but always he had come back empty-handed and grumpy. His quarry had been loud enough to overhear, clearly, but stealthy enough to elude him.

But now, as she followed her bounding Hunter around within the glassy public library, she knew exactly what had been bothering him: A Smoker. And they were _just_ about to pin it down.

Fights between a Hunter and Smoker typically boiled down to who saw who first. If the Hunter landed a jump, the Smoker would end up looking like shredded seaweed. Conversely if the Smoker managed to act first, the Hunter would wind up looking crushed to death by a boa constrictor. The risks involved had never deterred Snickers from leaving many a decapitated 'gift' on her bed for inspection come morning (further demonstrating that all Hunters were cats), and he'd left her with the impression that these lanky blighters amounted to his favorite sort of prey.

But this time he'd called her in for backup, which meant it was serious.

They'd temporarily lost their quarry and so the two of them paused. She peered across the lines of books. Snickers waited silently and did not so much as sniff. Then coughs gave their target away, and they resumed chasing. Where was it going? The roof? If this individual was very obviously clever, that might explain why Snickers hadn't chosen to take it down alone. Presumably it would try and use height and terrain to its advantage. It had to either get one of them by the throat and crush the larynx, or yank one off them off the side of the roof. She'd need to be ready the second she stepped out there, but they had an incredibly advantage two-against-one.

They emerged together from the top floor landing, and she spun about immediately. Standing above them and leaning on an antenna, one tongue protruding from a gaping hole in his left cheek and the tip hovering just over the top of her head, was a Smoker. Goat-like eyes with horizontal pupils and gray irises stared lifelessly through ehr. She didn't even have to lean into her scope to take aim.

"No!"

She hadn't been the one to speak. Snickers spun about with a roar. Her finger stayed tight on the trigger, but incredulity kept her from pulling it. The Smoker recoiled from her, and then picked his way around the opposite side of the antenna with his tongue still hovering threateningly close to her cranium.

"No!" he- the Smoker- the infected- repeated again in a voice as hoarse and dry as the desert.

 _You can speak._ She hesitated, not moving, not releasing her stranglehold on the gun.

The Smoker seemed to be staring at her, but that face was devoid of expression next to Snickers'. A tense moment held them all rooted in place. Then she noticed a second and third tongue curling about behind him, and that they looked to be coming from his ear and from a large deformation along his shoulder and the side of his neck. The tongues wrung nervously at one another, like a normal person's hands. Her brows furrowed, and she looked back to its-his?- face.

Snickers growled and padded forward an inch, but when no one and nothing attempted to kill anyone else, he paused and wrinkled his nose in an effort to divine what was happening.

She wet her lips, and asked a hesitant, "No?"

The Smoker looked from Hunter to Human, and then backed up and hunched down a bit, trying to get out of sight behind the shape of the staircase roof. "No." He insisted in a muffled voice.

She poked the tip of his primary tongue with her rifle, because it was uncomfortably close. The tongue cringed and retracted like a startled eel.

"No!" he repeated firmly, and started shaking his head. "No, no, no, no." He shuffled further backwards and hunkered further down.

 _What do I do with this?_ She glanced down at Snickers, who appeared to find all of this suspicious but unexpectedly interesting. She wondered if he could tell the Smoker was speaking Humanese, or if he was more focused on smell and body language. His hesitation helped convince her she wasn't crazy at least, particularly as Snickers seemed to hate (or love?) Smokers more than any other form of undead.

When the situation did not mature into violence, she decided that the only morally appropriate thing to do was to try and extend a peace offering and see what happened. Would he swipe at her? She decided to proceed as she had with Snickers, took out her can opener, and popped open one of Snickers' least favorite cans- chicken breast with lemon grass. Then she stood on her toes and hopped to tip the can onto the roof.

She stepped back quickly, but no tongues came after her. On the roof there was but silence for a bit, followed by a long scrape which suggested he had pulled the can to himself for inspection. A few coughs and a few snuffles later, and the Smoker crawled hesitantly back into view, tongues wrapping about the architecture like octopus tendrils.

 _This is bizarre, but no stranger than Snickers._ She tilted her head to the side, and wet her lips again. "Um. Hi?"

He had no facial expressions of any kind. His tentacles wormed nervously at the architecture. "H-hi."

Snickers wasn't sure he liked this, and pushed his shoulder against her leg to suggest she shoot the Smoker, retreat, or at least supply a good scratching. She rested a hand temporarily on his head to reassure him. "Can you talk? Sentences?"

The Smoker didn't say anything.

She took a deep breath. "You no hurt us, we no hurt you. Okay?"

Goat eyes remained dead looking and did not squint, but the twitching of his tendrils suggested he was trying to parse out what she meant. Then he looked down and she saw he was holding the can in both hands. "Thank y-you."

Invisible hands squeezed her heart. Maybe it was because his linguistic ability was on par with a small child's, and so made him pitiable, somehow, or cute, or... well her enthusiasm for this kill had certainly gone down through the floor. Could he just stay here and not attack them? Maybe.

"You're welcome," she murmured.

This seemed to be the right thing for her to say: The coupling of 'thank you' and 'you're welcome' seemed to reassured the Smoker that this whole conversation was a good one. He calmed down a little and then slunk backwards, and pulled his tongues away from the exit.

She took a deep breath and kept her rifle raised. Her shoulders were tense as she stepped gingerly back through the door, and Snickers seemed equally wary with his belly low to the ground and his head twisted sharply over his shoulder. The two of them made it safely back into the stairwell.

"Byebye..." mumbled their newest neighbor.

She winced. "Byebye," she called back, and then hurriedly led Snickers down and back home.

They were not coming near this Library anymore. Not until she'd decided what to make of this. God willing, the Smoker wouldn't come near _them_ , because either she or Snickers would have to kill him.


	17. Chapter 17

Smokers were ambush predators, like antlions or preying mantises. They weren't exactly immobile, but their hunting strategies involved a great deal of waiting. More so even than Hunters, they were reliant on identifying opportunities, setting up traps, and working to use the terrain to their advantages. But did she think their 'new neighbor' was inherently manipulative on every level? Was it logical to take his interactions at face value, or ought she suspect of malicious intent? He had seemed poised to grab her, after all, and only upon being spotted did he back down. Had he so feared them? Had he simply been cowardly? Was there some chance he had used speech to get out of rough spots before? If so, had he honored those 'agreements'?

Hunters were smart enough to work out a cunning little ambush, yet she'd never lost sleep wondering if Snickers might have been _manipulated_ her into taking care of him until he was well enough to kill her. Rather, she'd been much more concerned with whether he'd outright bite the hand that fed him out of a fundamental misunderstanding of cause and effect. What was making her evaluate Smokers differently?

The neighbor had s _poken_.

Before the world had gone to hell, there had been plenty of dog lovers who would have sworn up and down before God himself that their dog's life was worth the life of any human, and therefore ought to have many of the same rights. That was what Snickers was: A non-human life of tremendous value who served in the numerous roles of partner, service animal, friend, family member, and protector. But by _speaking_ , the Smoker had somehow stepped into some class outside of that classification into something closer to home, something almost-but-not-quite Human.

Humans were capable of more complex and confusing behaviors than animals. They could be good, but they could also be evil, manipulative, deceitful, craven, or sadistic. This was true even before considering what the Green Flu had done to infected instincts just in general. In fact, her new neighbor scared her in a way Snickers never had: an anxious, twisting way in the pit of her gut.

The sun was up at full zenith and Snickers was napping away in the sunshine. She was using the excellent lighting to fiddle with a little circuit board over a book. Hnh. If she was already calling this Smoker 'a neighbor,' maybe she ought to name him 'Roger.' She winced at her own train of thoughts, both because of the innocent place she'd sourced the name from, and because it was so much more _human_ than 'Snickers.'

It's _a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day to be neighborly..._

She heard a cough, and nearly jumped out of her skin. Snickers didn't seem to register the sound immediately and may even have been sleeping, which was unfortunate given she did the most _stupid_ thing possible and stuck her head out the window. Even as her body slid into place, she registered she'd just given a Smoker a clear shot at her head. But there 'Roger' stood, many stories below them, tongues wrapped in coils behind himself, holding an empty little can in both hands. He looked up at her with those dead gray eyes, out in bright sunlight with no hiding place in any direction.

She glanced over at Snickers, swallowed past adrenaline, and then turned about to fish around for a can. She opened it, placed it in the window sill, and then scooted away from the light.

After about sixty seconds of waiting, the tip of a tongue came up over the edge, dabbed around for the can, found it, coiled about its length, and then stole it quietly out of the sill.

She shrunk into herself and hugged her knees to her chest, feeling awful in about six different ways.

 _He's hungry. They're all hungry. The Green Flu was just an unintelligent virus; it wasn't trying to build a new ecology. It didn't necessarily leave them with the skills to survive._

She pressed her face into her knees.

 _They are going to die out. Starve to death. If they're all that's left- if we're all dead- is it immoral to help some of them survive?_

 _Are they all that's left to save of us? Of what we were?_

She got up and stumbled over to Snickers, and shook him away. He mewled in confusion at her, and then snorted and snuffled incredulously as she quickly stuffed herself into the space beside him and got underneath of his arms. He grumbled and sniffed uncertainly over her hair, and then curled back up into her and licked her hair. For once, she was happy to be drooled on.


	18. Chapter 18

She didn't think to memorialize October 2nd, the day of the outbreak, until it was too late. Then she felt incredibly guilty for having forgotten so many lives lost.

The days churned by, rolling into weeks and months. With December fast encroaching, the heat had died. Chilled wind blew in from the north, mingling with airs from the gulf, and occasionally summoning up quick, Floridian rains.

They- she and her Hunter- were picking out winter clothing at the mall when coughing put Snickers on edge. He immediately set off in search of the noise, so she drew out her .22 and crept out into the atrium to use herself as bait. Was this Roger? Unlikely. Roger had occasionally found them out on a hunt before, but Snickers had always stuck near her during those times and postured and paced more than he had actively hunted. He didn't want Roger coming close, it seemed.

Anyway, she kept her back facing one direction, braced her feet, listened, and waited. And while she didn't hear anything coming for her, but she certainly heard Snickers roar a warning, so she lunged forward into a roll. A tongue slapped up against one of her legs, twisted, and yanked.

She was five feet off the ground and upside down before she knew anything else, but her arms were free and she was facing the right direction. She pointed her gun towards her toes, caught the Smoker in her sights up near the glass dome of the ceiling, and squeezed the trigger before it could shake her about or smash her into anything. Bam. She knew she hit it only because the Smoker recoiled, but that was plenty of time for Snickers to score a leap in from the top of an overgrown potted palm tree: he hit the Smoker, grabbed its legs out from underneath it, and bit into the stomach area, and elicited a pained and startled holler.

The tongue gave a wild fling, and the she wasn't aware of much anything else until Snickers was padding up beside her and pawing worriedly at her face. She groaned, and rolled over onto her back. Well, she was on the bottom floor of the mall instead of on the top. Everything hurt, but a cursory wiggle and head patting suggested she'd neither concussed herself nor broken anything. Not for the first time, she reflected that her own post apocalyptic survival had always involved a lot more luck than it had skill. By the look of things, she must have landed on the fancy cloth roof of a stall and rolled off, breaking her fall distance in half. Next time," she told Snickers, "you get to be the bait."

He licked her face, and then promptly presented her with the main tongue of the newly decapitated Smoker head he'd just dragged up to gift her with.

"That's beautiful Snickers," she gingerly sat herself up, and was at least relieved to see this hadn't been Roger. "Thank you very much." She steadied herself on him and pet him, and then wondered why there was so much sweat on the right side of her face. Snickers giggled and licked her her again and again, and she realized it wasn't sweat; She'd cut her brow and the injury was bleeding copiously. Head wounds: they always did that.

"Oi," she muttered, and then rummaged around for her medical kit. "At least this place is full of decorative mirrors, since you suck so badly at holding them still for me."


	19. Chapter 19

By the look of Snickers' agitation, something altogether exciting had just waltzed into the city. A Tank? He would have been more cowed. Something smaller? He paced and repeatedly poked his head out over the window and flared his nostrils. When he took up sniffing and whimpering confusedly, she eased her rifle out into the sill and squinted past the barrel to see if she could determine what all this hubbub was about.

Shapes were on the road, waiting for one another and traveling in a snaky line that wound shadow to shadow. "Is it-?" Only people worked as a team like that! She ducked quickly to her scope to get herself a better look, and though she was not surprised to be proven wrong, she _was_ rather confused at how four Hunters were all together in one spot without ripping each others' throats out. Four? Five. She'd almost missed a point guard trotting in advance of his troupe. That they were traveling on the ground was peculiar but, on reflection, it also let them keep track of one another. They looked alert and wary and poised to run or fight at a moment's notice.

This wasn't just 'five hunters;' this was a _pack_ . Reverently she shook her head, because she might as well have been looking at wolves "And tonight, Mother Nature will be awarding the Niche of Group Survival to... drumroll please." If they had only just arrived in the city then perhaps they would pass on through, finding little to eat. If they stayed, she and Snickers were going to have one hell of a difficult time staying hidden from so many new hunters in an otherwise vacant city.

She looked from individual to individual, marking their clothing for future reference. The garments looked unexpectedly new and un-shredded. Were they benefiting from their shared pool of memory remnants? Had one of them mastered clothing? If his-or-her taste in garments were any indication, three hunters were male and two were female. Without any bared arms or legs, she couldn't make further judgement of their skin condition or overall health.

How many of them could she kill? It depended on whether she could get one or two of them out alone. It depended on whether they really did hunt together, and whether they were sickly enough that Snickers could kill one on his own despite his missing teeth. They looked vaguely organised: one even traveled out on the group's exposed flank as if to intercept dangers headed for the center of the column. If she could set up a trap-

-What was-?

"Oh my God..." she breathed, because the second hunter from the rear was indisputably female; her belly was so ovoid and so big that it very nearly brushed against the ground, and the shape of it was not in any way mistakable for a tumor. The female was gravid. Behind her, the rearguard male repeatedly paused to let her set the pace, and occasionally growled out for the lead to slow down.

Pregnant. She was pregnant. Her jean jacket and hood were bright blue and clean against an otherwise bleak world. She had to be on the verge of giving birth with a stomach like that and, by the tight defensive column it had organized around her, her pack mates knew it. Maybe they'd even brought her here to where there was little food but also little danger so that she could deliver the- the pup?- safely.


	20. Chapter 20

It rained.

It rained and rained and rained. The wind blew in a violent and unrelenting howl that rattled the walls. He didn't like the trembling and the banging and the whirring and the _noise_ , and yet there was nothing for him to do: so he paced about their den to try and relieve himself of the too-many stimuli. Even the air itself seemed to feel wrong: too light or, maybe, too heavy.

And BFF was utterly _useless_ , too. She sat with her book in her lap but her stare fixed vacantly out into the distance; her whole brain constipated with old pillow cotton, and choked on thoughts much too big to properly swallow. She seemed oblivious to everything, even with _him_ cooped up jittery in the same room!

He paced angrily back to her and yowled to let her know her attention was demanded. Surprisingly, BFF only winced and looked away. He recoiled in bewilderment. A wince? Why? What was the meaning of this? Were they strangers that she should mistrust him so? Had her brain once more contracted some malady of Ideas and Stress? Absurd! Was it _his_ fault that she _thought_ about these things instead of simply going out to run, fight, posture, or- at the very least- _smell_ these new interlopers? He grumbled and muttered and finally pushed himself in between her and her _nothing_ to occlude her _non-vision_ of it.

Many rooms away, a window shutter cracked free of its moorings, and the glass shattered with a crinkle, a crackle of appliances, and a bang as something heavy hit the ground.

Startled out of her arcane stupor, BFF finally looked up to see their own gaping windows, now splattered with a muddy shrapnel of debris, rust, and all the varied leavings of a strangely abandoned world. She gained her feet and hurried up to it. The air outside was _black_ with grit. He peeked out beside her and then looked up worriedly to her face. She had a very expressive face.

"It's a hurricane," BFF told him, sounding awed. These were the times he was at the absolute mercy of BFF's old-world intelligence. She could identify so many _things_ he could not; had so many _words_ he did not; and for all that 'thinking' itself was clearly a burden on her, it also gave her a nearly magical power.

That was probably why The Cougher kept coming near to see her, nearer than was _polite_ , nearer than was _safe_ ; it craved her understanding.

"It's not a _small_ hurricane." BFF looked to him and twirled a finger lazily in the air. "We're inside of it, but we should be okay."

He concentrated very hard, because he wanted to think about all of this without losing his train of thought. Grr. Losing his train of thought was more than a looming threat: every nerve in his body was alight with useless energy.

Hmm. After the snow time and melting time, Snickers and BFF had seen cyclone dancing like a nimble white finger, white as snow. BFF had been afraid of it, and he hadn't understood. Then it had touched the ground and dirtied itself and shrieked and shrieked, much worse than this.

Spinning wind... Were they inside something like that? Inside a whirlwind? It must have been a very different sort of whirlwind, to look and sound so different and to be so big; and BFF didn't look half so frightened. Maybe 'fat storms' were like The Fat People: the bigger they were, the slower they wobbled... That made a sort of sense. Did that mean storms could puke?

His thoughts had derailed, and it took him more than a moment to realize they had and to wrinkle his nose at it all. BFF made thinking look easy; so easy one could get lost in it. Hey! She was looking back to her seat, and that would not do; he needed much more attention from her lest his nerves drive him crazy. He yowled and pawed at her, and when she didn't understand him he curled up about her legs and sat on her foot.

"Snickers! What are you-?"

He whined, because she'd been ignoring him for _days_ and that wasn't right or fair at all.

And BFF _laughed_ ,yes! Excellent. And she reached down to him and pushed the edge of his hood back and scratched at the better side of his face and behind his ear and up through his hair. He hummed and purred and squirmed. Yes, yes, much better, _much better_. She laughed a little more and leaned over, and used both hands to scratch in big vigorous circles about his scalp, and he melted. Ohhhh, her not-sharp-claws were very nice. Very very very nice. He couldn't do the same thing, not even with his _feet_. Too sharp. Always drew blood. Mnnn.

Thinking People like BFF might have smell liked monsters/food, but they _weren't._ Thinking People were excellent. They just needed Climbing People to take care of them, was all. And to put down their boomsticks now and then and give scratchies and open cans. Though that was was probably much easier when no one thought they were monsters/food first or tried to kill them. Hmm.

 _Oh yes, scratch there, there!_ He tapped a foot rapidly on the ground, because that was _so nice._

"Ha! Have you eaten lately...?"

 _No! No and neither have you!_ He howled at the terribleness of it all, but then got off of her feet so she could attend to this matter. Not-eating was a grave crime. Grave! He followed her over to search through their cans (where she found all the tins of tuna he'd, um, _somewhat neurotically_ been chewing on).


	21. Chapter 21

Snickers called gingerly through the cold and the wet and the mushy; the world as it was after the hurricane, with an overcast sky and a whole lot of _everything_ scattered _everywhere_. He was downwind of the interlopers for the time being, but he couldn't be sure he had all of them accounted for. Their scents mingled and merged, and he couldn't keep track of all five simultaneously. (Five? One, two, three, four—aha! Yes, five, the same as he had fingers on a hand. Very convenient to remember, one of BFF's easier words. Four had been much harder.)

Snickers had filled up on tuna and peach cobbler filling the night before, and then curled up against BFF's side contemplating her once-incredibly-provocative-but-now-very-comforting smell. He tried to think (he just would never be as good at that as BFF was), and he realized her _smell_ was part of the problem with the interlopers.

In the beginning, everything had been much noise and anger and pain and confusion, and a great deal of adrenaline-filled clawing and biting and eating and attacking had all gone on. But with time (and with the advent of hunger and pain and cold), everyone had slowly settled down and begun employing their senses again. After all, not every meeting between Climbing People had to end in hostility... they could simply strut about and hiss and spit for awhile, and then sort of just _mind eachother's territory_ and go eat in different places instead. Very civilized and such.

So given that Snickers himself had BFF as a companion, and that the two of them shared food, it didn't take a particularly big stretch of the imagination to realize how the interlopers might have come together into such a large group: by sharing food, sharing hunting skills, sharing nesting places during the cold-snowy-bright time, etc, etc. Such Climbers might be reasonable people, right?

And the city was plenty big enough and empty enough that maybe some Climbing People here and some Climbing People over there, and some Fat People and Coughing People could all _basically_ get along (if they minded eachothers' territory (which the stupid Cougher _didn't_ , but... then he was also the only healthy-and-hungry-person Snickers had _ever_ seen voluntarily back down from a fight with BFF, so one supposed he deserved some special allowance)) if—wait, what had Snickers been thinking about again?

Oh yes, BFF. BFF _couldn't_ live in peace anywhere, because BFF smelled like a devil-food-monster-prey-thing. If proper Climbing People were to discover her, it would all immediately become _kill-or-be-killed-hunting_. Which was troubling because the weather was getting _cold again_ , and so leaving the city would be _bad,_ and five was more than two which meant a full-blown brawl would be difficult.

So, IN CONCLUSION, BFF absolutely couldn't negotiate a territorial dispute on their behalf. But _Snickers_ might be able to do so, and that was why he was out today. He would go close and investigate the Interlopers' situation and get a sense of what they were doing and where they were hunting, and see how they interacted with one another. If it looked like they might be tolerant of strangers, perhaps he'd introduce himself. Just to be sure, he'd rolled in some good dung that morning to mask anything BFF had left on him. On the other hand, if they were unfriendly, he and BFF would have to stalk them on the hunt and kill them one at a time.

 _Ah_.

There, he had found them. He perched in the twisted eaves of a shattered brick building, looking down across the alleyway at the broken craters some long-ago bomb (or Tank x.X ) had left in the ground. It was partially in the sewers and protected by a canopy of rusted girders and bent rebar, but it was surely a _nest_. Snickers could see that it was positively replete with fabric on the inside (and actually he was very slightly jealous. Why didn't he have a nest like that?) Two of the males were there, lounging in the afternoon sun and picking at old bones. A female smelled to be within.

 _How many are missing?_ He used his fingers to count. _Two missing_. He needed to back up and get into a less obvious position, where he might get a glimpse of either the hunter or huntress returning with food. If he could get a sense for their 'territory,' he could possibly bluff them into staying away from _his_ territory (and therefore also away from BFF).

Crackle Crackle.


	22. Chapter 22

Snickers twisted about and caught sight of a hooded figure sniffing his tracks. It froze as it saw him, and he sized it up. _Smaller._ He parted his jaws and croaked low to warn it back from him. _Smaller. Lighter_.

The other hunter bristled up in alarm, hissed, and scrambled backwards a few steps. Snickers had to fight off instincts that told him to pounce. He had moments to make a good decision or a terrible mistake, and he didn't know where one of the Interlopers was. He could pounce now and try to snap this little hisser's neck, but if it had _backup_ then he'd never get away in time before it and the other three reached him.

 _And I'm supposed to be nice. Nice like BFF. I should move smooth and slow, not fast and hungry._ He closed his mouth and slunk carefully down out of his perch to deny himself the high-ground. The interloper hissed, and spat and snapped teeth at him from afar, which was normal given their size differences.

 _I am not hostile. See?_ Snickers cooed. Hisser stiffened and looked him up and down, no doubt stricken and puzzled by his choice of approach. He cooed again and settled himself down against the floor. _I'm a friendly, friendly, pettable puddle of warmth. See? And much too fat to be weaker than you, so don't get any rude ideas._

Hisser stared at him for a moment, weaving hesitantly from side to side. Then it—or he?—spidered tensely closer and stretched out to sniff at him curiously. Hisser was male and his breath and claws were bloodied, so he mustn't have been particularly hungry at the moment. This was good. Snickers mewed to continue to establish his non-hostility.

But then another interloper bounded into view behind them, crunched her claws into the threshold to make for a leap, and _screamed_ a roar. Answering roars chorused up from the nest site. Snickers stiffened and stared in dismay.

 _You nasty, mean, uncouth piece of-!_

Roaress charged at him, and Snickers had no choice but to stiff-arm a terrified and confused Hisser backwards into her. Crackle-Thud-Roar. _Run away!_ He leaped up for the broken ceiling. Roaress extracted herself from Hisser and lunged for Snickers' feet, but betime she arrived Snickers had clambered to the next floor. _Flee the building!_ Snickers lunged for the window frame, crawled out it, and climbed up and up just as numerous claws reached the brick below him and started to follow.

He'd have to travel wide around the city; if he ran straight back to BFF and the Hiding Place, then everything would break out in a fight then-and-there. That would be bad! This was _all_ _five_ and he and BFF were only _two_ and those were not good numbers at all! He reached the rooftop, slick as it was with muck, and picked his way along to a jumping point.

ROAR.

Roaress was unexpectedly fast and surprisingly clever, and had backtracked through the building and climbed up on the opposite side. She clawed shrieking gouges open in the rooftop as she mounted it, and glared at him with an arched back and all fingers splayed out for attack. She was _big_. Not as big as him, but still _big._ He hesitated, because there was no easy way past her and he couldn't risk a fall. The sound of claws-on-bricks behind him warned he didn't have much time to plot an alternative route. To the left the building was very nearly demolished. To the _right_ was a whole bloody _river_.

Oh. Oh _no_. The river. Horrible flashbacks flittered through Snickers' mind. _Do I really have to...?_ But he _could_ , and BFF had made sure he could, and most other Climbers probably _couldn't_ , and there didn't look to be any other way across it...

Roaress prowled towards him. Another hunter clambered up on the roof behind him.

 _This is going to be terrible._ He bounded over towards the edge facing the river, took one last glance behind him at the assembling interlopers, and then steeled himself to become _incredibly wet and disoriented and unhappy_. He jumped.


	23. Chapter 23

She sat on the rooftop, laying low behind the air conditioner so that nothing might spot her, and fiddling about with the circuit board she'd found the other day. It was branded with _Raspberry Pi_ and, if she wasn't mistaken, that made it a _tiny computer_. The sort one might be able to power with double-A batteries but hook up to full screen monitors. It wasn't that complicated a little thing; all of its wires and pins were labeled. The trouble was trying to get energy from batteries into the wires, and she'd just taken apart an old calculator to see how she might begin.

The sky was giving her enough light to work by, though it was still very wet out, and the sun warmed her up a little bit more here than it would have in the apartment.

Hmm. This board. It was the sort of thing one wished one had a soldering iron for. And soldering—just in general—was one of those things one wished one had a Youtube for. Soldering, flint-knapping, water-purifying, trail-reading, watch-making... There were so many blasted things Youtube would be great for. What had poor, deprived humankind ever done before Youtube?

She put down the little board and frowned.

She did _not_ want to visit Roger's library.

A crackle of thunder above her warned that the clouds were getting denser, and that she most probably ought to get inside. They were running low on cans, and the undead didn't seem very keen on navigating in the rain, but she didn't really want to go foraging just yet. Not... not with that gang of Hunters still _around_ somewhere. She hadn't decided what to feel about them, hard as she'd tried to. She didn't want to think about the pregnant Hunter. She didn't want to think about Roger. Where was Snickers, again? Out, somewhere, doubtless still reeling from the aftershocks of cabin fever. Maybe he'd bring back something. Had he brought his rain coat?

She packed up her little work-space and then crept back to the downwards staircase. She reached the first landing, turned to descend to the next, and smacked straight into a very tall wall of _someone_. Someone who smelled strongly of _smoke_.

 _Oh no_.

Her rifle was slung behind her and therefore functionally useless. She had a belt knife, but Smokers had thirty-foot tentacles, perfectly functioning arms, and stood on average a good six inches taller than her. A grapple was unlikely to go her way. And she'd given up carrying a pistol a very long time ago because extra ammo had proven just too much for her to carry. Logically speaking, the _only_ hope she had in the world, at that very moment, was that she'd just been accosted by _Roger_ , and that he would continue to be friendly even without a very aggressive Hunter nearby.

She looked upwards.

He'd tilted his head to the side. Gray eyes peered down at her, blinking slowly. Snickers was ugly because he was scarred; Roger was ugly because half his head was overtaken by pustules and tentacles, and it was something of a wonder whether he had any space inside left for _brains_ because so many things were wriggling in there. The tongues hung about him like a mantle of medusa-esque snakes, all moving and writhing and feeling about like independent little lifeforms.

Huh. It was somehow easier to look at all that, thinking of _Medusa_. Maybe it was because Medusa was female and, if one read between the lines, very nearly the victim of her own story. Or maybe it was because Medusa was a Greek Gorgon and probably would have been shorter than her, and not six and a half feet tall. Or maybe it was because 'Medusa' was just a much better sounding and severely less creepy name than 'Roger.'

A very long and progressively awkward silence stretched between them. Then Roger backed up a step, which took him _down the stairs_ a step, which made him just a little bit shorter.

"Hello."

She swallowed. "Hello."

All the little tentacles writhed again, and he looked about himself as if shy. This time she was reminded of Davy Jones, who had been an excellent CGI job by the Pirates of the Caribbean team. After a moment, he reached into his jacket and pulled out a heavy book, and showed it to her. It was a child's encyclopedia, which meant it was filled with illustrations and useful for purposes of language-learning.

"H-hurricane?"

Her shoulders slumped, and she stared down at this poor creature who had trekked across miles of cityscape to visit the owner of a very hostile Hunter just to ask her whether he'd remembered the word for 'big storm' correctly. There was something so perversely innocent about him, gangly monstrous thing that he was, that he should be starved for conversation. She bobbed her head after a moment. "Yes. That was a hurricane."

His face was mostly paralyzed, so it took looking at his overall body language and interpreting the writhing of his tentacles to figure out that he was relieved, nervous, and excited.

She took a deep breath and then descended a step towards him, and he retreated back another step in surprise. She blinked, and then laughed a little. "I won't _hurt_ you." The mere idea was absurd, particularly when a few seconds earlier she'd been terrified of being eaten.

"Promise. _Vow_."

Vow! Now that was an interesting word, which again brought into question just how smart he was. She furrowed her brow at him. "I don't think I _can_ hurt you. Not without this pointed your way." She patted the butt strap of the rifle. "If you tried to kill me right now, I don't think I could stop you. So who should be more afraid, you or me?"

The Smoker stared at her for a long moment. " _Are_ you scared?"

"Every day of my life," she admitted. "Though particularly when I turn corners and accidentally bump into carnivores. I don't _eat_ whatever you are."

"You didn't promise," he pointed out.

She covered her face to smother laughter and shook her head from side to side. "I-I won't shoot you. I _promise_. I realize other people have probably shot at you earlier during this whole mess, and I'm sorry, but they thought they _had_ to in order to survive. And _I_ won't shoot you. I swear on anything anyone has ever believed in. I-I haven't heard someone _speak_ in over a year." She wiped tears from her face, and sniffled, and looked at him. "I'm sorry, I'm just a little..."

"Lonely."

She swallowed hard. "Have you had anything to eat since the storm?"

"No."

She stepped down towards him again, and though he retreated a little he did not stop her from grasping his arm. "Come on. I'll get you something," she tugged him to get him to follow her downstairs, to _let_ her downstairs. And he did.


	24. Chapter 24

She rooted out a sealed bag of instant mashed potatoes and a can of white-breasted chicken meat, and set to heating it up on a small kerosene burner they'd looted elsewhere in the apartment complex. The Smoker broke into a little coughing fit, and she glanced back at him.

"You will stay here?" he asked between coughs. "Awhile?"

Either his linguistic abilities had dramatically improved since first they'd met, or else the change in venue had simply made it easier to communicate. He seemed unexpectedly aware of the present moment, and quick of mind.

"For the winter at least."

"And after?"

"I don't know." She stirred her food.

Roger—or _Medusa_ as she was halfway inclined to call him just to get images of _Mr. Roger's Neighborhood_ out of her brain—was a stark contrast against the Smoker they'd killed in the mall a few weeks back. Of course there was the obvious: he talked. But other things were different, too.

He was decently clothed, and that was a rare sight on a Smoker. _Hunters_ were the infected who seemed most statistically inclined to figure out clothing, and then only just _barely,_ enough to blindfold themselves, enough to survive. Unless she was counting their odd fixation on fabric in general? She'd seen Snickers pick up 'attractive' cloth and strut about with it all possessively, and he'd made more than a few 'nests' out of blankets, T-shirts, and old wash rags. (Consequentially, she was rather sure Snickers' favorite color was orange).

Anyway, the dead-Smoker-from-the-mall had been dressed in threadbare rags, and a post-mortem inspection had revealed its arms and legs had suffered extensive damage from fungal infections, frostbite, and sunburn. By contrast, 'Roger' was dressed in a solid sweater and jeans with a trench coat on over top and waterproofed rain boots. She couldn't have picked a more appropriate outfit for him if she'd tried.

Then there were other more subtle differences, like the shy way he moved or the simple fact he'd backed down from a fight with her and Snickers. At the time, she'd credited that to simple mathematics: Smokers relied on slow strangulation and constriction, or dragging prey off of large objects to snap their necks. At short distance and against both herself and Snickers, he would have been at a disadvantage. _Now_ she wasn't so sure; maybe Roger really just didn't want to fight anyone.

It felt like all zombies got dealt a different suite of cards; some ended up clawing their eyes out in temperamental rage because they couldn't even figure out how to place their palms against their eyes; but others, others like 'Roger'... How smart _was_ he? He was talking fluently. He'd... he'd made that uncannily accurate 'lonely' remark.

His cough worsened and he cupped a hand over his mouth. She looked back at him. "Are you alright?" When he didn't make an attempt at answering, stood up and came over to him, and though he couldn't have know what to expect of her he leaned over to let her touch him. She felt swollen glands. "Are you coughing _up_ anything?"

He nodded into the coughs, and then forced them down with a grimace and showed her his hand. Thin, dark, black phlegm. Black as the air had been during the hurricane.

"Oh. _Joy_." He retracted his hand. "Let me look at my medicines." She patted his arm and went to the bathroom where she'd stashed less emergency-related medical supplies. She found a bottle of cough syrup, read the back to make sure it said 'expectorant' and 'suppressant,' uncapped it, and came back to him as she measured the required tablespoon. "Here. This should help sooth your throat a bit and empty out whatever that black crap was." Fungal? Tar? He _did_ smell a lot like smoke and, a little, of tobacco.

He took the little cup from her, peered at it with a blank face and a startled wriggling of tongue tips, and then drank it without a single question. His body language had such a _texture_ to it.

She didn't doubt Roger had killed survivors, just like she didn't doubt Snickers had. They'd eaten _something_ to stay alive, and once upon a time 'human' had been the most available dish on the menu. Though Roger seemed gentle and well-intentioned enough, there was definitely something _sharp_ in that skull. He'd been clever enough to get behind her and Snickers on the rooftop, hadn't he? He understood basic tactics, and _could_ kill.

"Are you staring at me?"

She blinked rapidly, and noted he'd been able to stop coughing. He was still holding a hand across his throat. "Oh. I was lost in thought."

"What were you thinking?" he asked, and she bristled a little. Roger was _not_ Snickers. He didn't just sit there, oblivious, while she tromped off across a mental circus in search of life's meaning. He was watching her _face_ , and he was very keenly present in the moment.

"How good is your English? I'm sorry. I haven't met anyone like you—someone who went through the Green Flu—who can still talk."

"'Still'? 'Still' implies a _before_..." He took in a slow breath, and seemed relieved when no coughing came. "I can still _read_."

Heavens above, he could perform logic. Whatever stumbling blocks Roger had faced the first time he'd spoken to her, he'd taken to cleaning this dusty attic of his brain out with a passion. "Then, have you looked at any of the last newspaper headings?"

He watched the ground, and seemed to be thinking. "What was 'The Green Flu'?"

"Oh, it... _killed_ everyone. Basically. One way or another."

He looked at her. "You are not dead. _I_ am not dead."

"... Do you remember anything from before the Green Flu?"

"No."

"Then whomever you _used to be_ is rather dead."

He straightened, seeming perplexed. "What did I 'use to be'?"

"H-human."

"You think I am not human?"

The question floored her, and her eyes doubtless widened to dinner plates as she stared at him for a long silence. Then she swallowed past a lump of her throat and looked down at the earth, and what nagged at the back of her mind was that The Green Flu had been reported to cause _severe_ _meningitis_ , which meant aggravation and brain damage. But the Hunters—the pack of Hunters—the pregnant Huntress—if the baby lived, then what would it be like? Monstrous? Human-ish? _In-between_?

She was shaking. Tears were on her face. "I-I... Um. May be slightly biased as a result of the fact that everyone I've ever known, in my entire life, and hundreds of millions of people, billions of people, from my mother, my friends, my coworkers, random people on the streets, to everyone in China or Australia or Europe—every last person on this planet has all suddenly sprouted claws and fangs and tentacles and is now trying to _eat me_ and one another."

He took a hesitant step towards her and said: "I'm sorry...!"

The sound of _empathy_ was almost terrifying, and she had to push out the rest of what she wanted to say as quickly as if she were removing a band-aid: "On the other hand you are rather human-like and aren't trying to eat anyone and appear to be able to talk so I suppose if you want to be called 'human' than yes, actually, you can probably-!"

A hand closed gently on her shoulder.

She fell silent, shaking, tears all over her face. Humanity was _dead_. The Infected had wiped them out. There was no one left in all the goddamn world; no one broadcasting radio waves, no one alive. There was no point whatsoever to her continued survival, no greater goal, no greater purpose, because no matter how long she personally kept alive she could never make anything better, because _Humanity was Dead._

Except, _except,_ there was the one overlooked variable, the one thing she'd forgotten, the one _hope_ : The infected themselves were human. They carried human genes, they nested in the ruins of civilization, and if there was any hope whatsoever that something _humanish_ might live on, and evolve, and eventually take up flint and tinder again and make fire and sing songs and invent computers and go to the moon, then it was _hanging on by a thread,_ just barely, strung out in the random genetic suites of cards dealt to each and every Special Infected. Not so very far away from her lived a Hunter male or female who had been dealt a card that let he or she make attempts at procreation. Everything—every conceivable future for the entirety of the human genome—rested on that 'Adam,' and that 'Eve,' and on their children, and on anyone like them, and on whomever and whatever they could recruit to try and protect them.

"I- I will _not_ try to eat you!" promised a Smoker ardently. "I will _not_!"

 _Fuck_ , she was not going to call him _Roger_ anymore! No. _No_. She was absolutely going to call him _Medusa_. And what did it matter if that was a woman's name? What did gender roles matter at _all_ any more? Medusa. Roger was officially now _Medusa_. Yes, that suited him, him and his shy body language and his ridiculous height and his mantle of tongues which were constantly slithering all over the place and occasionally pantomiming as he talked. She looked up at him—at _Medusa_ —and smiled weakly. "Thank you. Means a lot."


	25. Chapter 25

Medusa sat with her, quietly, as she finished up cooking the food and tried to compose herself. He broke into a few small coughing fits, and grimaced through whatever black gunk they brought up, but in general it seemed the expectorant had done its job: The cough was improving, and being useful did always make her feel better. She passed him the food when it was cool enough, and he thanked her and ate very clumsily with a spoon. Her mind wandered a bit as she calmed.

'Medusa' was a good name, but would the correct masculine form for such a name be something like 'Medusus?' Or just 'Medus'? The -a ending was feminine in Latin, but only for certain word groups. What was the _declension_ of Medusa? Was it of Greek or Latin origin? Once upon a time, Google would have quickly solved this problem for her. Alas. After a moment's thought, though, she recalled that Medusa-the-Smoker lived in a library, and that libraries were filled with books, books about tiny computers and books about Latin. And now that she felt a little better about Medusa's existence, surely some of those books could reveal to her the mysteries of turning-feminine-Latin-names-masculine to her. Well, that was something to do one day if she should ever become bored.

"Do you know your name?" she asked him after a bit.

"No." He shook his head, and with it his mantle of tentacles. The damage the Green Flu had done to his head was the only reason he had enough apertures for those tongues to exit without actually blocking his mouth; which, consequentially, was the only reason he could talk. "Skill came back, not memory."

"I figured," she sighed. "I guess it doesn't matter, anyway." Being comforted by an awkward Smoker who had apparently sworn off human-nomming for the foreseeable future had growing from alien to endearing, and maybe she really would survive the shock of it. It seemed he wanted something of her—perhaps just to talk? If that was the case, she could help. "Can I ask you some questions?"

"Yes. Can I ask _you_?"

She nodded. "Yeah. You can go first." He hesitated, and she tilted her head. "Need to use big sentences?" His tentacles all coiled as if surprised or offended. She laughed. "I'm _sorry_ , that was mean of me. But I get to practice talking to Snickers, at least. You take all the time you need."

"'Snickers?' This is what you call your... friend?" She nodded. "He does not eat you either. This is odd?"

"We've been together almost from the beginning of the epidemic. I didn't have very good survival skills, and he was infected but very weak and almost dead. We were lucky we found one another. We wouldn't have made it alone. We are particularly odd in that we travel together. Before meeting you, Snickers was the only other friendly zombie I'd _ever_ heard of."

Medusa stared at her for a moment. Well, he _always_ stared, but she was starting to translate tentacle-to-hypothetical-facial-expression, and it was easier to just _read_ him and not to track each little twitch, flinch, curl, and wave. "You call me a zombie?"

"Your... core temperature is rather lukewarm, you are carnivorous, and you bleed green and black."

Medusa considered this. "That _is_ like a zombie," he admitted.

"Well, no. Zombies are unintelligent, soulless, and eat people, and you are cute, clever, and page through childrens' encyclopedias, so I don't deserve any moral high-horse, and I ought to treat you as human." She stretched up to ruffle what remained of his hair. He flinched a little, but then went still. "Ah... that was one of my questions. Do... do I not look human to you?"

"It is the smell," he answered automatically, as if he had been thinking about it. "It brings _adrenaline._ Fear, hunger, anger, escape, rivalry, hate. Survival feelings. You are... danger... or... edible... or... _something_. Something that must be resolved fast." He cocked his head to the side. "The biting one—your 'Snickers'—he must be desensitized to it. He acts like it is not there. If you see through it, you are human."

"It bothers you?" It was sort of disconcerting to sit next to someone who admitted to feeling wild and primitive cannibalistic urges.

"I am cowardly. I fear things. I fear small spaces. I fear being _low_ , on the ground." As he explained this, she came to realize why he'd been terrified of her in the stairway. If flat spaces scared him, why had he repeatedly made the journey on foot to find her? "You have seen... the five? The five biters."

He was talking about the newcomer pack of hunters. "Yeah. I wanted to ask you a question about them, actually. Do they—things like Snickers—have some kind of language? Do they talk to eachother, or... can you understand him at all?"

Medusa straightened a little, though of course his face never changed in expression. "... Yes and no..." he answered slowly. "It is not _language_ , or complex. It is... signals. 'Keep back.' 'Attack.' 'This is mine.' 'Day is coming.' 'Hungry.'" Medusa looked to her. "I have not let them see me."

"You're afraid of them."

"So many! Together? I did not know what to do. If they hunt me, they can corner me. The... tongues..." He tilted his head back and forth. "They gain momentum the _farther_ they go. They do not flex and coil well until extended. I need _range_. I need a wall, but they can climb walls. I can try to kill them one at a time, but if I fail one grab, they will all come. I..."

"You came to me for protection in numbers?"

A loud thud and a clatter of claws upon the window made both of them jump and, it seemed, their survival instincts were about equally honed; Medusa had let a few tongues slip out for combat, and she had raised her rifle. But then she saw it was Snickers who was entering through the apartment window; and that he was absolutely soaked from top to bottom and seemed utterly put-out.

"What _happened_?" she burst in relief and dismay.

He paused, one claw raised, the other still on the sill. An annoyed expression peeled open into a sharp-toothed rattle of hostility. He entered the room, croaking, homing in on the intruding Smoker.

"Wait!" she interceded, stepping between him and a retreating Medusa. "Wait, wait, wait, he's not hurting anyone! He wants to help-"

Snickers spat, straightened up, and looked between the two of them. He jerked back an inch with an incredulous yowl, looked rapidly between them again, and then sprinted and _lunged_ at Medusa with a howl! She staggered to the side to tackle him as he jumped, wrapping her arms about his waist.

 _"Snickers_!"

He wormed free, hissed at her, and _shrieked_ at Medusa so loud as to leave the eardrums throbbing. He tried to lunge again. She once more got between them, and this time she smacked the Hunter up-side the head. Medusa, to his credit, did not intervene.

"SNICKERS!" she demanded, because at the end of the day she had the best brain between the two of them, and her cat needed to give her the benefit of the doubt. "What's gotten into you!? You don't have to like him- but you're supposed to listen to _me_!"

Snickers squeaked at the smack, even as surely she'd done him no harm. He slunk backwards, acting thoroughly wounded. She dropped her shoulders in exasperation and nearly rolled her eyes. "Oh come on. No. Snickers. I've smacked you plenty of times for biting what you shouldn't bite, you know I didn't mean-"

She stepped towards him, but Snickers retreated several steps and howled in such an over-the-top and forlorn way that trying to imagine what dramatics were going through his head was impossible. _Clearly_ someone had just had an _absolutely awful day_ , and was in desperate need of hugs and reassurances he'd been _horribly_ denied by the shock and inconvenience of Medusa's presence.

"Snickers," she pursued him, but instead of yielding to her, he spun about and leaped back into the window. He looked to the left and then to the right, breathing heavily. "What the are you _doing_!?"

Then she heard it: the far-off 'skree! skree!' of _other hunters_. The pack. He had the _entire pack_ after him.

"Oh... _no_. Get- get inside-!" she blurted. "Hurry! Get inside, we'll barricade-!"

Snickers leaped from the window, landed on the obverse wall, and began to climb. "Snickers!" she hissed after him. "Come back!" He looked to her, and then out towards the oncoming hunting pack, and then he quickly scurried up to the rooftop. She heard him _roar_ , and with a gutted sensation she realized he'd made a noisy and critical blunder in drawing attention to their hiding space, and now was going to try and lead them away from her. "Snickers!?" she wailed, but with that her hunter was gone.

 _"Fuck!_ "


	26. Chapter 26

"Shit. _Shit_ ," she hissed, backing up from the windows as the 'Scree! Scree!' of Hunters swung from one direction to the next. She ran to her day pack and threw out everything but ammunition, noisemakers, and trap materials. What was she going to do? Nothing! And if Snickers was oily and crafty enough, he'd give them the slip somewhere across the city and then lay low until all their commotion brought around a Bloater to break up the crowd. But if he failed? If they caught up with him? Cornered him?

She knew Snickers was no push-over, he was _big_ and well-fed. His overall systemic health was nothing to laugh at, either; the lack of any gangrene in his system made him _quick_ , and the result was he not only outweighed his nearest competition by a dozen pounds of muscle, but could also outmaneuver them. And while he was missing half his teeth, she'd seen him get the rest of them fastened down on the back of another Hunter's neck, and she'd seen those teeth tighten, vice-like, until finally the bone gave and he'd punched holes into the vertebrae with a loud, wet, crunch.

But while Snickers had fought Hunters before, there had been countless close calls. Fights were largely a matter of who managed to out-jump who, followed by a brief chance to overturn the ruling by lucky wrestling. A pounced hunter would try to roll over and get four sets of sharpened claws into play, and they could occasionally eviscerate an attacker at the belly. Weight and power mattered a lot, but Hunters fought _ugly_ , biting out the throat and other soft bits and letting their adversary _leak_ for a bit before closing again.

He always stood a frightening chance of losing against even _one_. To say nothing of what would almost surely happen if he had to fight _five_.

"You are going out there?" Medusa asked, alarmed.

She stood with her pack and cocked her head as she tried to listen for whether all the Hunters had gone past her. She wasn't going to be so stupid as to void Snickers' gambit, and waltz herself right out into the middle of them. "I need to tail them, from upwind if I can. I need to make sure they don't catch him."

"You cannot move like them," Medusa disagreed. "They will smell and surround you."

She looked to him and answered succinctly to cut off further argument: "Snickers is all I have. Literally. If he ever dies, I will shoot myself in the head, and find out firsthand if there's a Heaven or Hell. I would follow him into anything. Get yourself someplace safe."

She took a step towards the door, but then turned and grabbed up the Sniper Rifle from where it was leaning in the corner. Silent. These bullets were like lead ingots in her hand, but utterly _silent_ , and she could hit a target from a world away.

She prayed she wasn't going to need it. She prayed she wasn't even going to need to use the longneck, or any of the knick-knacks she'd brought in the pack. She was in no condition, strategically _or_ mentally, to be killing these five hunters. If she hadn't been so weak-willed and zoned out, maybe she'd have figured this whole damn thing out earlier and gotten something done _then_ , and this wouldn't be happening. Now all she felt was stressed and unprepared as she jogged swiftly out the door.


	27. Chapter 27

She caught a glimpse of them through her scope and grimaced to herself. The wind was still blowing into her face, which meant the Hunters couldn't smell her; not yet, not unless they backtracked. She quickly tried to pick out her next position.

Unlike in previous eras of her life, she couldn't just run down the street all wily-nilly and blast anything that tried to stop her. She was equipped with a grand total of two single-shot rifles and no melee weapon. She was supposed to hunt from the high ground, from birds' nests, and from well-selected shadows... She wasn't much of a _pursuit_ predator, and certainly not against superior numbers, and while she'd gotten the hang of climbing from roof to roof or ledge to ledge in these trying times, she was barely stealing glimpses of her quarry and already putting herself at high risk.

Snickers had led the pack on a wild goose chase, bouncing back and forth across the town like it was a marathon obstacle course at a prestigious dog show. Three of the hunters more-or-less seemed to be keeping pace with him, while two lagged but continually kept trying to intercept him whenever he changed direction. The chase was so ridiculously on-going that she had to hope they'd simply grow bored of him and come to the decision that he wasn't worth the trouble.

Wasn't that what most animals would have done, after successfully chasing off a rival predator from their home territory? Given up?

She heard a high-pitched squeal followed by a chorus of brays and roars. Shit. _Shit_. What was that? Either someone had gotten the jump on Snickers, or he'd just doubled back and taken a snap at someone in passing them. Or maybe someone had run afoul of poor terrain? She had to get a visual. She ran through the streets as dusk threatened, needing what remained of the sun. Her eyesight was about to be handicapped and theirs was about to become enhanced. Where? Where were they? Still north? She needed something _tall_.

The rear face of a town clock-tower rose into view on her left, with a fire escape straggling down the back side. That would do! Taller than the motel smashed up against its side anyway.

Grappling hooks were a nifty tool in the post-apocalyptic, and a person could make them out of almost anything. Tear a few sheets to braid a rope with, tie them around a rock and you could at least get a rope where previously ropes didn't exist. She'd made her own from the broken end of farming implement padded with velvet to stave off any loud metallic clangs. She tossed it up onto the raised end of fire escape, tested that it had lodged in place, and then pulled herself up.

Okay, first floor, reclaim the rope, scurry scurry scurry up the damn stairs. Another floor, another. She heard the Hunters and felt they seemed to be homing on a single location; the voices weren't panning to either side as had previously been the pattern. _Where_? Too damn _far_!

She set a foot on the rail of the stair, tossed her rifle onto the ledge behind herself and shouldered the sniper. Loaded? Yes, loaded. She jerked the gun up with a deep breath to steady herself, and balanced the barrel on her knee as she peered through the scope.

 _Where_?

She caught sight of a Hunter loping across a rooftop at a fast clip, and followed its vector till she found the spidery bodies swarming around an entrance to a junky, low-lying plaza. This was bad. Snickers wouldn't have ended up on the ground floor if given a choice in the matter, which made her think that some kind of jump or pounce had gone awry and he'd been forced to scamper for the nearest cover. The shop in question only seemed to have one window serving as an entrance point for the door-handle-impaired zombies. Snickers might be able to use it as something of a bottleneck, but it was a mite too broad and could be safely breached just as soon as the hunters realized they ought to try approaching him together.

She needed to act. If she killed or at least wounded one of them, it would either attract attention to herself or else scatter them. Whatever happened, it would at least momentarily take their attention off Snickers. She tried to get one snugly in the sights.

Steady. Steady.

It wasn't easy to hit a Hunter. Not with their gangly, four-legged gallop and the way they slid and scampered about walls and preferred to jump from perch to perch as opposed to walk. she had to pick whether to aim for the head, or to aim for the body; she had to pick whether or not—if none of them would sit still long enough for her to aim—she'd just shoot the rooftop nearby to spook them.

She'd never held a gun before the apocalypse. And when it had broke out, and her fellow survivors had thrust weapons into her hands, she'd been pathetic at hitting her target even at short range and whilst equipped with a shotgun. And she was now the world's last precision sniper.

Oh, the heroes of yesteryear would sigh...

There. Two of the hunters had been lagging behind the other three, and even now they weren't pacing about with anywhere near the agitation of their fellows. One of them she didn't have a clear shout to as he perched and watched his brothers. The other was the pregnant one, obviously slowed by her swollen belly, but with her teeth bared in a fanged snarl as she _dared_ her adversary to come out and face them all.

Careful. Steady. Twitch by twitch. This target was barely moving.

There. Even as she breathed, the scope lay with the cross-hair neatly on 'Eve,' hovering somewhere between her head and shoulder. This might be a full kill shot.

 _Eve_?

She'd _named_ her? Somewhere back in the closet of her mind, she's named her, and the name she'd picked was 'Eve'? Why? _Why?_ Hell, why not _Lilith_ if she was going to pick something so ominous!? _Just... just squeeze._

 _Squeeze the trigger._

 _Please._

 _Snickers is in there and needs-_

-A building _exploded_. Not the building Snickers was _in_ , no, but a building directly perpendicular to it. Concrete heaved and buckled, with rebar bending out in all directions as dust and grit rained down over the front of the shop where the two ground-bound hunters were. A roar boomed out from the aftermath that sent chills down her spine and left all the hunters staring like deer caught in headlights.

She didn't even have to turn her barrel to look. She knew what she'd see, and prayed Snickers was smart enough to hide under a shelf and not come out until it was over.

 _Tank._

Eve was still under her sights, though twisted about to gape in a new direction, and probably would only be there but a fraction of a second longer. Should she pull the trigger? No, she didn't have to, because the situation had changed. A _Tank_ , of all things, was about to indirectly save Snickers' ass.

The Tank saw Eve and her attendant first, because they were on the ground and they were _right there_. It thundered forward like a charging gorilla, much more suited for _running_ than Hunters were, and the two of them recoiled with squeaks. A crunch of metal signaled the Tank had picked up something—maybe a car? She lost track of Eve as the hunters screamed and scrambled vainly to get out of the way.

The three on top didn't know what to do; the two below lacked for any real cover or things to climb. The Tank waddled forward those last steps, now up on two stumpy rear legs with both fists knuckle-deep into a car, halfway through the motions of a throw. The malformed head of the monster—nearly buried in its grotesquely swollen musculature—came straight into the sights of a sniper rifle.

 _Not yet! It has to kill them first!_ And it definitely would! The two on the ground were as good as dead, and any of the three up above were going to die if they tried to help.

But she pulled the trigger without any real hesitation.

And in that moment she was David-killed-Goliath. She was something _amazing._ Her gun gave a soft little cough, and a tremendous kickback against her shoulder, and then the Tank's sturdy head imploded back into the flesh and bones of its body. One Shot. One Bullet. Dead. The body pitched forward, and the car landed upon it with an organic squish, and the street went hushed and quiet.

She slowly lowered the rifle, and then grimly reached for the next shell to load it, even armed with full knowledge that it might never be spent.


End file.
